The Princess, the Songstress, and the Plushie
by UnderAnon
Summary: What if all that stuff your magic teacher taught you about alternate universes actually became useful before you expected it to? (From the author of Inseparable. You're in for a ride.)
1. Magic Class Was Useful

For fans of my other work, this is a version of _Inseparable_ in which they know about other universes and do things accordingly. The familiar-looking parts aren't quite _Deltarune_. The rest of this really isn't either one...

* * *

Michelle skip-rolled up to her front door, casually tossing a small bit of ball lightning from hand to hand. Her after-school magic club had been a blast, as usual; she'd tossed electrons around before, but not like this. She was good at what she did, a prodigy by any definition of the word, but she wasn't the only talented twelve-year-old attending DJT in Newer Home (Go Snails!) She wasn't even the only one her age who had even more genetic alterations than just the magic cheat code.

It was weird to be home alone, but she knew where everyone else was - Mom was at her day job saving people from themselves (Mom's power SAVEd a lot more people than that), Uncle Azzy had another busy day of chirurgery, Grandma was still at the school doing principal stuff, Grandpa was at the UN (again...), her big sister was in Russia and would portal home in a few hours, her three brothers were at a friend's birthday party, her little sister was at another friend's house (it was easy to have a lot of friends when your last name was Dreemurr) and Dad - well, Dad had his thing to do, too.

She telekinetically slipped off her shoes in the foyer, her socks sinking into the soft carpet as she walked into her room, not wanting to toss lightning around indoors. She had biology homework to do (it was a final-version day, Mom would SAVE that night), but she needed a break. She took off her purple backpack and set it down into the corner of the room, surprised at how dark it was- it'd been sunny when she got in. She flicked the lightswitch, but her hand passed through empty space where she'd expected it to be.

Then the floor wasn't there anymore, either.

She briefly hovered in place, startled, but no mage could keep that up forever. Instead, she looked down, aiming for a pile of papers visible in the blackness, and gently levitated down next to it, her dress fluttering around her as she did.

Wait. Her **dress**?

She felt the silky texture of the bright purple frock (it looked like something out of an anime), felt the ribbons in her hair, wiggled her toes in the comfortable, slipper-like shoes. She hadn't passed out on her bed, then - she'd had lucid dreams before, but they were nothing like this.

The idea that she might have panicked never even entered her mind. There was a rule she followed, a rule her parents never really had to teach her: _If you don't know what else to do,_ _ **think**_ _._

At least, wherever she was, she had breathable air and quantum mechanics and everything else that human beings needed to not suffocate or explode into unbound energy - or the transition had changed her into something that didn't need those things. But that was rarer, and she still **felt** like herself. Lighter, though. Her phone seemed to be her only possession to survive the transition unscathed, and she pulled it out of her dress pocket- fortunately, it had those- and gently tossed it from hand to hand. Yeah, gravity was about 4/5 that of home.

Almost certainly another universe, she figured, although she theoretically could have been teleported to another planet or something. Still, her altered clothes and the pile of papers suggested that she was in one of the thirties, a category of pocket universes whose existences were based on that of their visitors. Her magic still worked, which meant that she probably wasn't in one of the high thirties- but a horrible idea struck her. "Hello?" she asked out loud. "If you've brought me inside you, I'd really like to know why." Silence was the only response, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Probably not a consciously self-aware universe, then, not one of the fifties. **Those** things, her father had once explained, tended to cause **problems**. She focused on the pile of papers, trying to turn them into flowers - it didn't do anything, which ruled out Type 31(a), consciously mutable. Good. That category tended to evaporate quickly once somebody tried to make a square circle or something. She also doubted she was in a 32, which wasn't directly mutable but would respond in very strange ways to her thoughts. It could be a 31(b), subconsciously mutable (not good either) or a 31(c), supraconsciously/SOUL-mutable, but she guessed that she was either in one of the 33s, mentally created, or a 34, mentally and environment-created. (A type 35, purely environment-created, probably wouldn't have changed her clothes. Then again, universes didn't always fit neatly into categories.)

She flipped open her phone. No Signal - she'd expected that. You couldn't make a phone that could do **that** , at least not with her home's physics. She opened her favorite app and scrolled down to tap one of her most basic spells, a familiar string of syllables came out, and a globe of low-energy amber light appeared above her head. She nodded in approval. Verbal spells were also a go.

The next piece of information she really wanted, although it technically wasn't really important yet, was how she got there. She tried to think of anyone from her school who could have pulled off a prank that involved teleporting her to another universe, and came up empty- there were a few kids who'd probably want to, just to say they did, but to set something up inside her house? Maybe Mom or Dad could have done it- Shelly really had been interested when Mom talked about her adventure in the Underground (a since-evaporated type 24(a)(4), a sub-universe that altered the properties of its home universe on its creation and forcibly contained a class of beings - i.e. a prison universe). They wouldn't, though. Dad's obstacle courses weren't like this, and Mom just... wouldn't, nor would the rest of her family.

Then again, if her youngest brother Mander **were** behind this, she was pretty sure that Mom would actually spank him for it.

Right, next up- find out just what she had "fallen" into. There was nothing under the pile of (disappointingly blank) papers, and the only visible way to go was a light down a corridor some unknown distance away. She felt one of the utterly black, unreflective walls, and the floor; both were solid and smooth. (She was quite glad that the outfit had come with light, silky gloves; despite how much she knew that she shouldn't care in a Type 33 or 34, she really didn't want to be touching random objects with her bare skin.) She pointed with her finger and traced the walls with a low-power violet laser, a trick that her older brother Jimmy had mastered much earlier in life and eagerly taught her. She couldn't find any openings in the walls that way, though, and the ceiling seemed to have sealed itself above her. She considered maybe knocking on or breaking through a wall, but she didn't know what was on the other side of the walls nor how thick they were- for all she knew, there could be **nothing** on the other side. The pile of papers were illuminated of their own accord, not from a source, and she noticed with a touch of alarm that she, herself, seemed to be glowing with reflected light from no source as well, and she dispelled her light globe after realizing that it wasn't helping. She kind of wanted to figure out why, but figuring out the physics of this place would have taken her at least a few hours and she wanted to be home before that.

She clicked her tongue, listening for echoes and not hearing any. Down the hallway it was, then.

It wasn't long before she spied something, a pale, glowing star, a faint light that Michelle suspected was not entirely made of photons. She realized what it was at once. Mom didn't need SAVE points anymore - her DETERMINATION let her SAVE anywhere, anytime in her home universe - but she'd explained to her daughter what it had felt like, the DETERMINATION welling up within her, the light that only she could see. Michelle briefly considered the pros and cons but chose to take the opportunity, reaching out, feeling it flow into her, saving the state of the universe. She didn't know what might happen if she kept a SAVE in another universe, but she did know that without one, she could **actually be killed**. That particular train of thought took her somewhere she didn't want to go. Dad had to be home when Mom LOADed and SAVEd for a reason. Not being home for the first could make a copy of him- which was, for multiple thaumaturgical reasons, an incredibly bad idea despite how productive it might have seemed- and the latter could easily put him out of existence entirely. (Dad had killed at least three otherwise invincible godlings that way, getting them to follow him home right before Mom LOADed, thus erasing them utterly.) Maybe Mom could LOAD her back in at home if she perma-died here, but she didn't know what she would or wouldn't remember after that, and she definitely didn't want to forget any of this.

As she continued, she walked between strangely geometric rock formations, where the walls were solid brown something instead of solid black nothing. Eye cutouts were engraved in the walls, and dark cutouts that looked almost like pools of ichor were embedded in them, almost in the shape of a dog's snout. **That** thought took her aback. If Dog Himself were directly responsible for this, her dad was going to go ballistic. Her whole family would probably freak, actually. It was too dark to see what, if anything, was in those holes - shining a light did nothing - and so she continued, perturbed. At the edges of the cliffs far above the canyon she was in, she noticed wobbly things with red heads, about the color of erasers, and their stalks were different colors; they shook as she passed beneath them, startling her. They looked almost like colored pencils - which, she realized, was what she had quite a lot of in her room. A definite hallmark of a 34, and because it looked like an 'adventure' setting, she pegged it as almost certainly a 34(b) - mentally and environmentally derived with a significant elsewhere-created component. It was feeling a bit too linear, though. She liked to write on lines, but she wasn't all that keen on being forced down one. She decided against levitating all the way up to the pencil-things, though; she had to save her energy and wished that she were still wearing her roller shoes.

The markings on the wall provided some welcome relief, a sign that somebody was around and this wasn't some empty hell. A puzzle of some kind, apparently. It would have been nothing for her to float over the gap in the floor; she could probably have made a running leap even without the aid of magic. Still, it was the principle of the thing, and if she ever met the puzzle's creator, she didn't want to have cheated.

The numbers 7, 8, and 9 were crossed out on the top row, then the number 260 was shown below that in black, then the number 1 below that in red. Three holes were embedded in the wall, each with the emblem "x, +" and then a number of 2, 3, or 5. Puzzled, she puzzled over the puzzling puzzle. Was she supposed to get to 260 by multiplying, then adding each of these numbers? She didn't see how. Maybe she was supposed to get above 260 without having any digit be a 7, 8, or 9? Oh, she could do that. She pressed the 5 button, and the red number became 13 rather than the 10 she was expecting.

After a brief moment of confusion, she figured out what she was supposed to do. She was starting to like this universe, even if it was a little easy.


	2. The Counterparts

Michelle smiled. Her math teacher had once played a trick on the class, introducing them to different-base arithmetic, but that had been a few years ago. 1 times 5 plus 5 was 13 - in base 7. And 260 in base 7 was (2 * 49) + (6 * 7) = 140 in base 10. She did some mental math. If she took the 10 she had... times 2 plus 2, 22, 3 and 3, 69... 2 plus 2... 140. The base 7 numbers showed 260, there was a brief jingle, and a platform swung up from below to form a bridge.

She was dearly tempted to magically open up the guts of the machine, to see how the display and the mechanisms worked, but she didn't have the time or the spare energy. She hadn't eaten since lunch, after all, and as she continued down the not-quite-a-hallway, she was reminded of how thirsty she was as the steady hum of rushing water caught her ears, the air grew misty, and she caught the pleasant, wet glow of a series of rushing waterfalls.

Her uncle had told her how important proper hydration was for humans; as she had nothing to store it in other than her own stomach, she figured she'd better drink her fill. Better safe than sorry; she cupped out her gloved hand to hold some water and then magically boiled it away, using a magnification spell to look for impurities. (Her hand- and the water- continued to glow throughout, which unsettled her more the more she thought about it.) She couldn't see any, so she cupped both hands and proceeded to magically heat each sip of water to kill any germs before telekinetically drinking it. Probably overkill, especially in a 34(b), but she'd read that one book with the dragon queen who got dysentery.

A notion struck her abruptly, and she reached through the waterfall - finding only stone. That was mildly disappointing. She'd half-expected a treasure chest to be on the other side - it was that kind of world. She also had a notion of where the water was actually coming from, and she just wished she'd brought some food coloring or something, so she could see if, and how fast, the water going into the bottom came back out the top. Instead, she continued onwards, and the pattern of waterfalls turned to mudslides. The path - as delineated by both solid rock walls and solid black nothing- seemed to guide down her one of these mudslides. (She again considered going up, and again discounted it.) She didn't want to get the dress dirty, but her shoes seemed to repel mud, so she slid instead of floated, gently coming to a stop at the bottom. Nope, no dirt on her.

She heard a faint something from down below. Somebody or something was... singing? With magic, she quietly slid down, and piles of.. something, that looked for all the world like giant dust bunnies (she made a mental note to vacuum her room) surrounded her, and as she gently brushed one, it puffed out like a dandelion, making her briefly sneeze.

Whatever had been singing abruptly stopped, and Michelle saw something out of the corner of her vision run from one dust bunny and into another one.

"Hello?" she called out. "I'm not going to hurt you." She touched the dust bunny where the figure had run, and it evaporated at once.

Michelle would never forget the sight. A girl - glowing, the way all solid objects did here - was covering her mouth in shock. Her skin was almost translucent, her nearly white hair glistening, her purple eyes wide with horror, her hands covering her mouth as if Michelle had given some grave offense. The other noticable thing was her clothes - she seemed to be dressed for a survivalist expedition, the way Michelle would have wanted to be dressed before going into another universe. Backpack on her back, knife at her belt, combat boots, what looked to be light body armor of some kind. _She's_ _ **me**_ , Michelle had time to think, as the girl ungainly ran away, as if her gear were too heavy for her. Michelle considered whether tackling her was a good idea-

" **LIGHTNERS! YOUR DOOM IS AT HAND!** " The voice sounded like a harpy gargling gravel while tearing its claws across a chalkboard, only down-pitched by three octaves. Michelle looked up to see its source but instead saw a rain of deadly bladed feathers the size of her head. Gasping in surprise and terror, Michelle knew that while she could dodge this, the other girl had no hope - she grabbed the other girl under the armpits, weaving between the feathers, flying as fast as she could. The other girl did not scream or fight, which Michelle took as a good sign- but whatever it was was right behind them, and Michelle did not even spare a backwards glance, instead jumping down the nearest mudslide, accelerating them with magic. Colored pencil heads were to either side, and with horror she saw that they were also throwing blades - she used every ounce of magical power to dodge and run away, and she almost didn't see the end of the mudslide. The thing was still right behind them, but she saw ahead that there that the path was mostly blocked by rubble and debris -she jumped through it, and whatever was behind them was too big, beating against the rubble in a storm of wings, the loud snap of a terrible beak trying to get through. Michelle turned around briefly but only caught a glimpse of the bird-thing, and what she saw of it, she did not understand.

 _I really should have taken the upwards route_ , she thought ruefully. Then again, they were both unhurt, and things could have been much worse. "Hey, are you all right?" she asked, letting the girl go gently, and the girl kept her hands over her mouth.

"You use... your voice... to talk," the girl rasped out in a whisper.

"You don't?" Michelle rasp-whispered back, and the girl shook her head. Michelle was very glad for the Law of Familiarity - the general law that everyone you were likely to meet from another universe was going to breathe the same air as you, digest the same foods, share the same overall evolutionary paths, speak the same language. It still left room for weirdness, though. _This girl comes from a culture where you only use your voice to sing. Noted._ "What's your name?"

"Sheila," the girl whispered.

"Michelle, but my friends call me Shelly." _Which is_ _ **not**_ _a coincidence. This girl really is my alternate. A 34(b) from multiple sources? Gaster's going to_ _ **love**_ _this._ She was considering what, if anything, to ask the girl, or whether it'd be better to give her some time for the shock to wear off.

Sheila looked around a bit. "How did you fly with no song?" she asked.

"Where I'm from, we don't need to sing to do magic." What she did need to do magic was a little something called blood glucose, which she was starting to run out of. She could cast directly from fat, but that was generally unhealthy. Still, she'd have to keep the spell ready- there were apparently things that might cause more immediate health problems.

Sheila looked confused, and she again briefly looked around furtively, as if trying to see if anyone were watching. "Then why do you wear a high adept songstress dress?"

"So that's what this is," Michelle replied, still rasping. "This means power to you. **That** is something I would want to wear in a place like this," she added, gesturing at the other girl's clothes. Briefly, she considered asking to switch, but realized it wouldn't work. Sheila was too skinny - way too skinny, actually, just in general. Michelle was by no means muscular, and her uncle had given her regular reminders to stop relying on her magic so much- but Sheila looked almost malnourished.

"It's heavy," Sheila responded. "Everything's heavy here. Even me." Michelle realized why the gravity was low: this 34(b) was meeting them in the middle, gravity-wise. She wondered what the math was for that.

"Not to me," Michelle rasped. "Can I carry your pack?" Sheila gave it to her, a little too readily for Michelle's taste, but it was empty. Michelle frowned a bit, but at least she had something to carry things in. "I can't keep doing this, you're not going to freak out again if I talk with my voice, are you?" She stopped rasping near the end.

Sheila almost looked around, an instinctive motion, but stopped. "I guess so, there's nobody here," she rasped. "Except... that thing." Michelle remembered how that nightmare bird- if even it was a bird- had spoken. _That's her nightmare, not mine. I hope we don't meet anything that I might be afraid of._ Speaking of fear, there was definitely something wrong with Sheila. Michelle had first thought that she was in shock- a perfectly normal reaction for an unaltered human who didn't attend Gaster's magic classes- but it wasn't shock. It was like she was used to being in high-stress situations, as if she'd lived with terror her whole life. _Baroque culture, check. Afraid of getting into trouble, check._ The next realization was so alien that Michelle barely comprehended it. _Where she's from, she'd get in trouble for_ _ **asking questions**_ _. The next time I ask her to do something, she's going to immediately do it._

"Let's keep going," Michelle quietly said. "This way." Sheila followed at once. _**Dog**_ _I wish I didn't have that confirmed. Who the hell are her parents?_ The answer was as obvious as it was terrifying, and Michelle was considerably more troubled by that than she was the strange town in front of them with the extremely weird sloping roofs and the unnerving signs promising weapons, armor, items, a place to sleep. The doors were locked, and Michelle was tempted to unlock them with her magic- it couldn't be that hard- but she had the stomach-churning feeling that there were nothing but blank walls on the other side. She supposed she could have avoided the castle with the giant dark waves pulsating upwards from it- she was very tempted to do just that- but this place likely held something of value, if not the way out.

Something was moving in the blackness as they passed under the portcullis. It flew overhead and then landed with a strangely soft thump. To Michelle, it looked like a baby doll made out of eagle feathers, nearly as tall as she was. Somebody had stitched a crude dress onto it, and its face was glass marbles and a beak made of wood. The eyes were shining, but the rest of it was nearly black as pitch. For a brief moment she'd thought it was the thing that had attacked them, but it was too small.

"Mother'd sent me to take a couple of Lightner mice," it scratched out, its voice strangely soothing. "Sweet little mice, to take in a trice." It advanced, and it was all beak and feathers and claws.

"Stay back or I'll set you on fire!" Michelle shouted, pointing a finger.

"You claim to have fire, and I name you a liar," the thing said. "And now, Mom says that you must expire." It rushed forwards, very quickly- and Michelle abruptly gave up on her plans of lasering it and threw a fireball directly at its face. It shrieked, and abruptly all of it was burning, and it spread its burning wings and Michelle had absolutely nowhere to go, so she tucked-and-rolled and her back was lashed by a terrible tongue of flame, causing her to scream in agony as she smothered her back on the cold, black cobblestones. But it was screaming too, and rolling on the ground, and flying off above the walls. She touched her back with her gloved fingers and felt raw agony, crisped cloth, toasted hair, and a wet squelch. _Dog, it melted my_ _ **skin**_ _, I'm going to be in a burn ward for weeks, if I really can LOAD I better do it now-_

There was a song, melodic and fluid, with an unearthly melody. The pain in her back lessened, and she felt something shift back there. Disbelieving, she touched her back again, looking with awe at her alternate. _That's a song of_ _ **healing**_ _, that's totally impossible, how would the magic even know where to put stuff?!_ In Michelle's world, magic was something you did to physical basics, like gravity and energy. Tossing your own extracted combustibles, sure, chirurgery worked too, but this was beyond anything she'd known. Sheila was still singing, and with a touch of envy, Michelle realized that Sheila didn't even stop singing when she inhaled, retaining perfect pitch even as she did so. Tears were running down Sheila's face, but she kept singing, not stopping until Michelle and her dress were completely mended.

Shocked, Michelle said the first thing that came to mind, and regretted it even as she did: "You're trained to sing no matter **what** , aren't you?" Sheila finished her song and nodded, still crying but not sobbing in the slightest.

"That was my friend," Sheila rasped. "I made Flapper myself. And now she hates me."

Michelle was trying to figure out how to reply to that when a voice asked, "Is it safe for me to come out?", not raspy or gravelly but somehow very, very familiar to Michelle's ears. A hooded figure came out from behind a door, making no noise as it walked. "Umm... well, I hadn't told you that you were the heroes yet, so I guess I can't blame you for being unheroic by burning someone."

"Were you seriously expecting me not to?! That thing wasn't an ordinary monster!" Michelle protested. "Assuming either of you even know what that is." They clearly didn't.

"This is a world where you don't have to fight," the hooded figure said. "At least it should be, but everything's gone all topsy-turvy. So, we'll all just have to do our best!"

"Do our best at what?" Michelle challenged him. "Scratch that, how do I even know I can trust you? The last two whatever-you-are tried to kill us!"

"I will sing the Song of Truth," Sheila abruptly rasped out, and began singing a slow, sonorous melody. _A song of_ _ **truth**_ _? How would that even work?!_

"One plus one equals thr..." Michelle began to say, and simply couldn't finish her sentence. The words wouldn't come out. Startled, she decided on something else. "An alternate Chara is responsible for this. An alternate Chara is not responsible for this." Okay. As fundamentally wrong as this magic was, it **didn't** work on things the speaker didn't know. That would be very, very broken very, very fast.

"This might help, too," the hooded figure said, putting down its hood and stepping out of its cloak, revealing a fluffy, pitch-black creature with a green robe and an extra-large snootle. Michelle opened her mouth in shock. All of the Dreemurr kids had Asriel plushies somewhere in their rooms, made with real Asriel fur. Even if the kids were too old for them, they were still priceless heirloom keepsakes. If Sheila's feather doll had taken form in this 34(b), then **of course** Michelle's plushie would be here! "I'm Sirale," the fluffy boy said, and Michelle realized in half an instant that it was an anagram of "Asriel", of course it would be, she was seeing a color-flipped version of her uncle as he was as a kid-

"Will anything bad happen if I hug you?" Michelle asked in one breath.

"Umm, I was going to get to the hugging part later," Sirale said, "but if you want to do that now, it'll be okay!" Michelle picked him up in one motion, burying her face in the ever-so-familiar fluff, not realizing that she, too, was crying. Thoughts were racing through her head, thoughts like _why is my toy's counterpart so nice and hers so evil, how can a world with such reality-bending magic be so awful,_ and the big one, _why am I here,_ but they were all drowned out by _I have my own Asriel counterpart to hug, and I really need that right now_. That, and a large meal, a hot bath, a long, relaxed conversation with both of them, and probably a nap.

Michelle realized she was being selfish. "Hey Sheila, you should hug him too!" Reluctantly, Sheila went to the other side of the fluffy boy, and soon they were making a Sirale sandwich. Michelle saw the unspoken questions in her eyes, and they were very similar to her own.

"Um, when you're done," Sirale said from between them, "I need to tell you a legend..."


	3. Failure to Empathize

"May we go inside?" Sheila asked in her rasp, and Sirale was quick to accomodate her. Michelle still wasn't sure what of the castle was functional and what was just "set dressing", but at least Sirale's room existed; it was full of fuzzy and plush things, and Michelle estimated that the total amount of transdimensional Dreemurr fur would probably go for millions, if not tens of millions, at auction, assuming it'd carry over. (She wouldn't actually do that, of course. Her dad tended to be **unhappy** with people who sold things like that.)

There were even teacakes and a tea set. Sheila looked at them longingly for a moment, and Michelle misunderstood. "We've already breathed the air here," she said. "I don't think it's going to get worse if we eat the food," she said, telekinetically plucking a teacake up and eating it in two bites. Mmmm... sugar. She had no idea where it could possibly come from, but she would definitely need this.

"Oh, yes, help yourselves!" Sirale offered, and only then did Sheila begin daintily nibbling. "Okay, well. This legend is about two heroes of light that will arrive and fulfill the ancient prophecy, as foretold by time and space." The two girls looked at him intently. "Once upon a time," Sirale began, and Michelle almost guffawed aloud (and Sheila seemed not to recognize the phrase, which was worrying). "a legend was whispered amongst shadows. It was a legend of hope. It was a legend of dreams." Michelle felt familiar with the way he said those words, but Sheila recoiled slightly, as if he had said something profane. "It was a legend of light. It was a legend of dark. This is the legend of Delta Rune." This was Michelle's turn to recoil, but she didn't want to interrupt him. "For millennia, light and dark have lived in balance. Bringing peace to the world." Michelle sort of doubted that. "But if this harmony were to shatter... a terrible calamity would occur." Michelle and Sheila looked at each other, both of them completely believing that. Michelle wasn't sure why Sheila looked alarmed, but Michelle's entire Type 1 universe had its laws of physics altered long before she was born, once the Underground's barrier was broken and monsters returned to her home universe. If this 34(b) was going to do even more- "The streams will run red with blood, and the people will quail with fear." Sheila looked very afraid for a moment, as if she were realizing something horrible. "Then, in a puff of dust... the last monster will draw her final breath." It was Sirale's turn to notice something, and Michelle figured it out- she'd used the term 'monster' before and Sirale realized that it was part of his prophecy. "Eventually, shining with hope... three heroes appear at worlds' edge. A princess... a songstress... and a Prince of Darkness. Only they can seal the fountains... and banish the Angel from Heaven. Only then will balance be restored, and the world saved from destruction. Today, the fountain of darkness, the geyser that gives this land form" (Michelle instantly adjusted her model of how this universe worked) "stands tall at the center of the kingdom. But recently, another fountain has appeared on the horizon... and with it, the balance of light and dark begins to shift... Thank you for listening to my long tale." Sirale smiled, and Michelle knew how much her mother must have enjoyed it when her uncle did the same as a child.

"I have questions," Michelle said. Sheila looked at her abruptly- _yup, she's really not allowed to ask those where she's from._

"Oh, please, ask away!" Sirale said, delighted at her interest.

Michelle almost asked if it really began with 'once upon a time' but there were way more important things. "You said seal the fountains, plural, but there's only two fountains in this story. Does this prophecy involve **sealing off this universe** with **us in it**?" Sheila visibly realized something again but didn't look scared.

"Oh, my! I hadn't thought of that! I certainly hope not." _This Azzy isn't as smart as my Azzy. Not at all._ Dr. (and Prince) Asriel Dreemurr (M.D., Ch.D., etc...) was scary-smart, smarter than Michelle herself ("but not by much," he'd told her). But that very tall goat had Frisk to draw from for years.

"You said that this prophecy was foretold by time and space, that light and dark have been in balance for millennia," (which made sense, Michelle judged; if the residents of this 34(b), or class of them, were created from human objects, that matched up with human history pretty well) "and that this is a legend whispered among shadows. Just how old is this prophecy?"

"I really don't know," Sirale said. _How old are_ _ **you**_ _?_ Michelle could have asked, but she chose not to because following up on things like that might backhand his entire worldview sideways. _How old is this_ _ **place**_ _, exactly?_

"You said that this is the legend of Delta Rune," Michelle noted. She pointed to it on Sirale's robe. "That's literally my family crest. Grandma said it came to her in a dream one day." It was the first time she'd considered that monsters- who were basically semi-solid dreams themselves- would also dream.

"Wow, that's an interesting coincidence!" Sirale exclaimed. "I wonder what it means?"

"There aren't any real coincidences when dealing with other universes," Michelle explained, reciting what her magic teacher had told her. "There's an infinite number of them." It was actually an trans-infinitely high version of infinity, beth omega, but neither of them would have had the slightest clue what she was talking about. "Whatever one we get to has to have lots of things to do with us. Otherwise, we wouldn't get there." The metaphysics, expressed in mathematical terms, were beyond even her.

"You sure know a lot about this stuff," Sirale said. "I bet the person who taught you is really proud of you." From someone else, that might have been sarcasm, but Sirale was clearly incapable of that.

"That would be my magic teacher," Michelle proclaimed happily. "W.D. Gaster." She was not expecting the reactions to that. Sirale shrank back from her, as if she had uttered something truly horrifying. Sheila covered her mouth in shock. "Okay, it's okay, it wasn't the Gaster you know." Too late, she'd remembered- Gasters were like Charas, only arguably even worse. There was an uncountable number of them, and the vast majority were terrifying. " **My** Gaster is nice. A little weird- okay, a lot weird, but nice. So is my dad." Prince (and Dr., although his doctorate was not in medicine) Charles Dreemurr wasn't actually so much 'nice' as 'nice to his family and on the general side of good, depending on who you asked', but she wasn't about to explain that part. "And yes, Grandpa and Grandma are King and Queen, so I really am a princess." Sheila already envied her; she couldn't make that much worse at the moment.

"That... um... I have... a question, too," Sheila hesitantly rasped. "What's... a princess? And a prince?" Michelle's entire worldview was backhanded sideways, and she was even more confused than when Sheila had pulled out impossible magic. 'What's a princess?' was something a three-year-old might ask, a three-year-old who never watched television or read a fairy tale. Sheila might as well have asked 'what's water?' or 'what are shoes?'

"Um, if your dad's a king or your mom's a queen, then you're a princess if you're a girl, and a prince if you're a boy," Sirale explained. He stopped for a moment. "Hmm. I guess it's different for me. I'm a prince anyway." Michelle clamped down on her curiosity.

"But my dad's a king, and I'm not a princess," Sheila said, downcast.

"That's because your dad is a jerk," Michelle said. _And my dad can probably beat up your dad_ , she chose not to say. Sheila looked at her with shock, as if expecting lightning- or Chara- to strike Michelle down where she stood. "He's not here," Michelle explained. "I really doubt that anyone he's controlling is here either. You can talk with your voice if you want. You can ask questions. You can say whatever you want about him. Nobody is stopping you from doing any of that right now."

"I can talk with my voice," Sheila sang softly. "I can talk with my voice, like Dad can, and no one will punish me." Her musical voice gradually rose in volume. Abruptly, she threw her arms around Michelle, who hugged her back. "I've never felt like this before. I bet you know the word for it."

"You're free," Michelle said gently into her ear, and Sheila had not, in fact, heard the word before. "C'mon. Eat some more. Drink some, too. We don't know when we'll get the chance to do that again." Michelle took a generous helping of tea to prove the point. "Hey, Sirale, you're a prince, right? Do you have any armor for us, maybe non-lethal weapons? Or a shield, something that might block razor death feathers?"

"No, I'm sorry I don't," Sirale lamented. "All the weapons and armor stores were looted by the Queen's henchmen, the owners enslaved." Michelle stole a glance at Sheila, who had never heard that word either. If you had no word for freedom, how could you know what slavery was? "I'm... the only one left here, and that's just because I can hide this door." _The Queen is not completely stupid. Noted._ "But I do have something to teach you!"

For the briefest of moments, Michelle envisioned Sirale pointing to a dummy and telling her to talk to it, as Mom had once humorously recounted that Grandma had done with her. Michelle was twelve years old, not a baby. If Sirale did something like that, she was going to punt him right between his fluffy butt cheeks all the way to the other fountain, wherever it was.

"I can tell you how to get through encounters!" Sirale said, which was just close enough for Michelle to envision a pair of field goal uprights and relish the idea of a good, solid kick. It wasn't like he had bones to break or organs to rupture. "If you do certain actions with your enemies, you won't need to fight!"

"Well, **you're** the one who knows whatever..." She almost said 'monsters' but realized that they weren't. "Darkners, I guess?" Sirale nodded happily, obviously glad that Michelle was so quick on the uptake. _Who, exactly, did he expect?_ "You were their actual prince before this queen took over, right? So why don't you take charge of the diplomacy instead?"

"Okay, that makes sense!" Sirale chirped. "Onward, brave heroes!" Michelle and Sheila looked at each other and shared a giggle, then giggled at their sharing of the giggle. Onward they continued, out of the town and past a large, open area and to a great door that would surely be more impressive had it not been completely smashed in.

On the other side of that door-

Sirale looked like he was about to puke and Michelle didn't even know if he could do that. Sheila was visibly horrified, lips quivering. Michelle felt a sick sense of pride. **She'd** turned this bird, which was five times her size, from a terrifying bulk of feathers into a quailing, wrecked mass, nothing more than a giant, broken doll. "Burned and maimed and unable to fly," it croaked out, "left and abandoned by Mother to die."

"Flapper!" Sheila half-rasped, half-shouted, running to its side, crying.

"I wouldn't do that," Michelle started to advise, but Sheila was already singing the Song of Healing in a rich, clear, perfect tone. Michelle decided to take the opportunity to record it on her phone. Verbal spells worked that way, after all; she didn't actually need to try to pronounce the arcane sounds with her own throat to cast them, although she did know how. It took eight full repetitions- Michelle counted- before Flapper got back onto its _her?_ clawed feet.

"I give you the greatest thanks for repair," Flapper croaked happily. "Once more may I take to the air." It fixated its glassy eyes on Michelle, who was obviously very ready to toss another fireball. "You are giving me cause for alarm. Here I am healed, have you come to harm?"

"You were going to snap us up like mice," Michelle pointed out, holding up a placating hand. "If you've stopped doing that, I'm not likely to burn you again."

"Wouldn't have fought you, would rather have hid," Flapper lamented in its rasp, "but Mother said 'kill', and I do what I'm bid." It had been posturing before, Michelle realized. Hiding its reluctance and fear behind a forced toughness. It was rare at her school, but she'd seen it before.

"You don't have to anymore!" Sheila shouted with her singing voice. "You don't have to listen to her, or anyone! You're free! We're free!"

"Freedom for you is not freedom for we. Darkners need Lightners, you see."

"She's right," Sirale added. _'She', then._ "You're our protectors. Our creators. Assisting you is our purpose." Michelle suddenly considered the idea that Sirale and Flapper (and the Queen!) were actually artificial intelligences. Then again, the question was probably academic- she doubted there was a lot of daylight between a purpose-built AI and a native intelligence of this kind of 34(b).

"Then I really wonder why this didn't get turned into one of you," Michelle said, holding out her Gaster-, Alphys-, and DARPA-approved smartphone.

"What is that?" Sheila musically asked.

"This is my phone. If I were in my home universe, I could talk to a lot of people with it. I keep all my verbal spells stored on it." _And now I know that if anyone tries to steal it, someone here is untrustworthy._ "And it can do a bunch of other stuff, too. Actually, I want to test something." Michelle carefully lasered herself on the arm, just above her glove, causing a superficial burn. She played the recorded song from her phone, and to her utter delight, the burn vanished, as if it had never been. "This actually works! Maybe now we can..." Michelle's voice trailed off. Sheila was staring at her, her face a demonic cocktail of burning contempt, volcanic outrage, and cold hate.

"Can do what, with you, with that **thing**? I'm **free** ," Sheila said. "Free to be with whoever I want. Free to **rule** , to be a **queen**. And I don't need you," she said, pointing at Sirale. "Or **you**." Michelle almost expected a laser in her face before remembering that Sheila couldn't do that. "I have Flapper now. Flapper's my **friend**." Michelle was shocked at how childish her counterpart sounded, but she still, still didn't understand.

"The prophecy-" Sirale started.

"To **Gaster** with your prophecy!" Sheila musically screamed at him. "He's probably the one who made it up anyway! And you, **Michelle!** Take that phone and shove it up your ass!" She started to laugh, a laugh from someone who had never been truly allowed to laugh before, who had never known freedom until it was thrust upon her. " **Shove it up your ASS!** " she delighted in saying, knowing that no one would ever punish her for it. "C'mon, Flapper! Let's go take over the world!" Abruptly, and with more dexterity than Michelle thought she had, Sheila climbed up on Flapper's neck, who took off at once. Michelle could have done a lot of things there- briefly followed them, dazzled them with lights, even dashed in and ripped Sheila right off her mount- but those would be violent, and bad, and not at all what she wanted to be doing. She considered LOADing but decided to see how this would play out. Besides, it was just one more unfairness to Sheila, who had had a lifetime of them.

"I should have known something like that would happen," Michelle said, finally understanding, looking down at her high adept songstress shoes. Why had this universe given her those things? "I totally kicked over her apple cart. A lot. She spent her whole life learning how to sing precisely, no matter what, and I made all her hard work totally irrelevant." It was so, so obvious in hindsight.

"It's not your fault," Sirale consoled her. _I'm the only smart one of us, so everything's my fault_ , Michelle might have said. _You're not my uncle, you're just a plushie of him as a kid, and Sheila's so messed up that she'll probably need years of remedial everything after several weeks on Mom's shrink couch._ Frisk's power wasn't exactly a full-time job, so she got into the theory and application of thaumaturgic psychiatry. "She just needs some time. I'm sure she'll come around." Her estimate of Sirale went way up just then. "Let's keep going. We're sure to see them again soon."

"Okay, but first, I gotta pee." She'd drank too much fluid. "And then, I want to give that bird an orange."


	4. Glue and Plunder

"I'd always hoped that the first time I went to another universe, I could enjoy it instead of worrying about it," Michelle lamented to her living plushie. She couldn't turn her brain off, which was a blessing and a curse. She couldn't stop wondering about the fundamental questions: why there were even such things as purple grass and orange trees if there was no sunlight, where the gentle breeze blowing the grass back and forth was even coming from, why the geometry of this place tended to lend itself to black-walled corridors just wide enough for Flapper (or, possibly, Flapper's mother...) to fly in, exactly what the prophecy meant in real terms, why this universe existed at all. Then there were the disturbing questions, like 'how old is Sirale', 'am I Sirale's friend or more like his mistress or both', 'will the residents cease to be sapient beings after Sheila and I leave here', 'if this place still exists, if I hug the plushie in my room after this is over, will Sirale feel it' (she made a mental note to test that), and 'exactly what kind of hellhole does Sheila come from'. Then there were the more immediate questions, most notably 'Where did Sheila and Flapper go', 'How do I get Sheila to stop freaking out', and 'what are we going to do about Flapper's mom'. **Then** there was the mightiest question of all, 'what do I do next?' At least the corridor-like nature of this universe (or at least this part of it) didn't leave too many options for that.

"It's okay to be worried," Sirale said. "I'm worried too." Which, Michelle figured, was about the nicest thing he could have said. "Oh! A fork in the road!"

"Cool, finally. Okay, which way **doesn't** take us to our destination?"

"Which way... doesn't...?" Sirale asked, confused.

"Yeah. It'd be different if this place were bigger or a different setting, but if we just go straight on to our destination and don't take half a minute to explore dead ends, we might miss something important," Michelle patiently explained. _You've never played an adventure game, but you live in one._ "If it actually goes a completely different way, we'll just turn around and go the right way."

"Um... okay, that makes sense, I guess. That way goes to the other castle, so... this way doesn't." Sirale said, and they had to make exactly one turn before the route dead-ended into an orange treasure chest. (Michelle wondered if it was orange because it was made of orange trees.)

"See what I mean?" Michelle asked, smiling. "Now, how to open it..."

"It's probably not locked," Sirale explained. "Who'd lock a treasure chest? If it were locked, nobody could open it!" Michelle looked at the little goat and suddenly burst out laughing at the absurdity.

"Even if it is, that's not what I'm worried about," Michelle said. "It might be trapped. Or.. do you know what a mimic is?" Sirale shook his head. Michelle inspected the hinges and went behind the chest. "Okay, don't stand in front of it. I'm going to open it... now." She popped the latches from behind and jumped back. "Anything in there?"

"There's a glowing shard!" Sirale chirped. Michelle took a look. It was, in fact, glowing even more brightly than everything else in this place glowed, and she suddenly had a very, very bad feeling. Immediately, she pulled out her phone and quickly found the spell she was looking for. (One of her friends had once asked why she'd saved so many weird spells. She'd always replied 'just in case' without having a real reason. She made a mental note to tell her friend that preparedness had turned out to be a good idea.)

Telekinetically picking up the shard, she briefly downshifted the electromagnetic spectrum at everything within her arm's reach, and the shard immediately went dark. She breathed a sigh of relief as she canceled the spell.

"Why...?" Sirale asked.

"I couldn't even begin to explain what 'radioactive' means," Michelle said, pocketing the shard. Even if it wasn't normally dangerous in a world of wizards, everyone agreed: Radiation could be a real bitch sometimes. "Just chalk it up to me being weird again." Sirale looked at her, unsure what to say. "I know you think I'm weird, because you don't understand what I'm doing or why." Sirale was not the first one in Michelle's life to think that, nor, she knew, would he be the last.

"I do think you're weird," Sirale admitted, "but I also think you're cool." Michelle put her arm around the little dark goat, because he was fluffy, and they continued on.

The shop they came to was embedded in the wall in a way that Michelle found a bit off-putting, even disgusting. The plastic bits embedded in the black walls reminded Michelle of the pictures she'd seen of an infected, decayed tooth, only with the colors reversed. Its proprietor, however, was familiar, and she laughed aloud when seeing what it was. For her sixth birthday, one of her presents was a puzzle made up to look like a cash register, and it was one of the many old toys she was holding on to for her own eventual children (or so she told herself). Its Dark World counterpart looked rather similar, only with its long button-arms turned into tentacles that would surely have given internet perverts ideas.

"Oh, hello!" the cash register burbled in a cross between a friendly chirp and an underwater bubbly sound. "I'm Cashy, and I bid you welcome to the Cashy Shop!"

"I'm surprised the Queen hasn't put you out of business or looted the place," Michelle said.

Its voice suddenly became deep and low, and the tone was something that Michelle associated with great whales and giant squid. "She tried. Once." It did not say more, and Michelle chose to browse instead of ask details.

There wasn't much for sale. Some Dark Candy and a couple of labeled Darkburgers sat inside a small cooler (she firmly decided that she did **not** want to know what **they** were actually made out of, and that would **not** be on her pile of questions), what looked like (and probably was) a marker-turned-sword, and a curved, almost shield-like object that Michelle realized was probably an altered protractor. She reached to her pockets, and it was only then that she realized that while the transition had left her with her phone, it'd eaten her wallet, and the handful of Benjamins and Jacksons she kept as emergency cash had been consigned to the void.

"Can we just have some of this stuff, or are you really going to ask the heroes of legend to give you money for it?" Michelle asked as gently as she could.

"Money," Cashy replied forcefully.

Michelle was about to indignantly ask if this thing had any idea who she was, but her father had once told her that if she needed to pull out the 'do you know who I am' bit, the answer was obviously no. She'd remembered that well, even though pretty much everyone in her life had known who she was. She'd even used casual glances at various authority figures- particularly in China- to get her friends into places where they probably weren't supposed to be, as 'My dad is Charles Dreemurr' was roughly a billion times more effective than 'My dad is Li Gang'. Suddenly, the idea of being stuck in this universe terrified her- she would never be able to portal to an Asian country for a sleepover, ever again.

"Do you offer loans?" she asked Cashy instead, and the tentacle-machine moved in a way that simulated shaking its head.

"We could sell the shard!" Sirale suggested.

"A **glowing shard** and **we don't know what it's for**?" Michelle asked him, eyebrow raised. "I'm not selling that for money! We'll just come back later or something. Cashy, I'd actually like to sell you a bunch of stuff at some point, but... I don't think that'd be **possible**. Actually, wait a minute! Cashy, where's my gluestick?" The puzzle machine had originally contained mints, long-since eaten, and she'd used it to store a childhood treasure: a My Little Pony gluestick that her parents had enjoyed a chuckle at. When they let her in on the joke (the glue was **made of** My Little Ponies!), she knew she had to own it, and she'd used only a little bit of it before storing it away forever. The glue was probably long-dried, but here, in this 34(b)...

"What's the password?" Cashy challenged her.

"1-1-2-3-5-8-13!" Michelle instantly replied. She'd quickly figured it out herself with the help of magical feeling and careful listening, and she'd been saddened to learn that the Fibonacci sequence already had a name.

"You remembered," Cashy burbled fondly, opening itself up and pulling out a girly, glittery, pink-and-purple, unusually thick longsword. The pommel was a horse's head, and the crossguard was a squeezing lever. There was no proper sword tip, just a covered hole.

"I'd never forget **you** ," Michelle replied, smiling and taking the weapon. She telekinetically opened the tip without pressing the squeezer, taking a very slight whiff. This was not the original glue at all; from what she could tell, it was extraordinarily strong superglue, almost certainly a concentrated version of one of the Gorilla Glue varieties that Asriel had warned her against breathing too much of. She was just glad that it seemed to work on conventional chemistry instead of some other principle.

"If I ever have to use this," she warned Sirale, "don't get anywhere near it. If this gets in your fur, it will **never** come out." She turned back to the cash register. "Thank you, Cashy!"

"No," the cash machine burbled, "thank **you** , Lightner."

"Dang," Michelle realized as she left, "no scabbard." While heavy and unwieldy as swords went, the steel Gluesword really did have something of a tapered edge, and Sheila's backpack was too small to hold it. "It's all right, I can carry it."

The wind picked up somewhat as they continued, and it seemed to blow a few figures towards them: silent, paper-doll dancers that seemed like a cross between Michelle's construction paper and something that Sheila would have made. Something in their movements spoke of ill intent, and she gripped the sword. _Whether I cut them or I use this glue on them, that's permanent damage._ After roasting Flapper, she really didn't want to hurt more Darkners. "Advice?" she asked Sirale.

"They're dancers," the dark goat chirped. "So... dance!" Sirale stepped away as they began rhythmically firing bits of energy in synchronized patterns, small balls of massless not-quite-plasma that Michelle understood to be a form of 'monster bullets'. But there were many ways around their slow attacks, multiple routes in three dimensions, and Michelle giggled and cavorted and pranced between them, parrying a couple with the Gluesword, pirouetting and frolicking as if she hadn't a care in the world, her magic propelling her in ways that would have made no sense to someone without it.

As one, the dancers backed off and formed two parallel lines, letting them pass, bowing slightly in defeat, offering strange-looking bills ( _ah, that's the money around here_ ) that she swiftly pocketed. Michelle turned to hear a loud floof-floof-floof of fluffy, clapping hands. _**Just**_ _like my uncle._ "That was perfect!" Sirale chirped.

"I wasn't **that** great," Michelle said. "Arial would have done so much better." The dark goat looked at her quizzically. "My big sister," she explained. "She's a dancer and a singer, and she makes her own performances. **She** would have understood Sheila **immediately**."

"Do you miss her?" Sirale asked.

"What? No, we live in the same house, but she's going to start worrying about me if I don't get home soon," Michelle explained. "Her and my big brother James and my little brother Gary and the youngest, Nomie and Mander. They're the most different that twins can be." Two thoughts crossed her mind- the first, that her family probably already was worried about her because her phone dropping off the network almost certainly sent alarm bells ringing somewhere, and the second, that she might actually never see her home or family again.

"It must be nice having so many people who care about you." Michelle thought she'd detected a very small note of envious sorrow in his voice, but it was hard to tell.

"It is," she agreed. She still refrained from asking him questions about himself. "You see why I have to get home? If I never make it back, then... it'll be like I died." The idea that her whole family would spend the rest of their lives missing her and wondering what happened to her was too sad to seriously consider. "And I'm not supposed to be **able** to die. As long as I'm at home, I **can't**. My mom won't let me, or anyone in my family." Something had scared Michelle once when she was very little, maybe a monster or just a close call with something dangerous; she couldn't remember what it was, but she did remember doing a lot of crying while her mother told her that she couldn't ever die; all she could do was make a lot of people very angry for making Mom do her thing when she wasn't supposed to. "And.. I have that same thing here. So we can't here, either. But I don't know how the time thing works between universes, so I really don't want to be repeating stuff here."

"I hope you don't have to use DETERMINATION either," Sirale said, and she was surprised that he knew the name for it. "But.. uh... you might have to," he said, gesturing to a giant steel thing with buttons on its body, a Mettaton-like wheel, mechanical noodle arms, and a scowling face on its screen.

"Oh Dog, that's my calculator!" It was her ancient TI-83, the one she'd picked up at Temmas years ago. "Got anything before I zap it to death?" It was rushing at them fast while firing rotating sine waves. She casually tossed Sirale to the side, making sure that he wasn't the one being attacked.

"Well, if it's a calculator, um... use logic!" Sirale had nothing concrete to offer in that regard, but fortunately Michelle did.

"A equals B!" Michelle yelled at the calculator, still dodging, and the algebra appeared on its screen. _Awesome._ "Therefore, A squared equals AB! A squared" - a wave came dangerously close to her head just then, and she took a breath while preparing for the next one - "minus B squared equals AB minus B squared!" Shouting this next part while dodging waves (spikes, now) was difficult, but she persevered; it was what she did. She decided to avoid saying 'parentheses' out loud and used talking speed to get the idea across. "Therefore, A-plus-B multiplied by ... A-minus-B equals B multiplied by ... A-minus-B! It slowed down in its attacks, seemingly curious as to what she was doing. "Therefore, A plus B equals B! Therefore, B plus B equals B, 2B equals B, and **two equals one**!" The calculator halted, completely, and fell onto its face.

"I don't think it's permanently dead," Michelle said, turning the great device-beast over and looking for the right button to press while snagging money from a few small compartments on its sides. "There's probably a way to reboot it." _Loot and reboot._ She chuckled to herself.

"But... how did that work?" Sirale asked. He obviously didn't get it at all, and Michelle couldn't blame him for not knowing algebra.

"It's something my math teacher pulled out a few years ago," she said. "It's really simple..."


	5. Militarized Playthings

"...actually, I should probably explain this to both of you." None of the buttons were labeled on the great machine, but Michelle knew where the on button was because it was her calculator after all, and it booted up with a strange, flat look on its face. "Are you going to try to kill me again?" The number 0 appeared in place of its face. "Did the Queen send you after me?" The number 1 appeared. "Do you want to know how I did that?" The number 1 stayed on. "And if I had told you to divide by zero, what would you have done?" The word ERROR appeared on its face. "Okay, it's like this. All the algebra actually works. A plus B, times A minus B, really does equal A squared minus B squared, so that works backwards too. Again, the calculator knew where to put the parentheses. "But in this example, A equals B, so when you're multiplying and dividing by A minus B, what are you really doing?" The word ERROR appeared on the calculator again, swiftly followed by a large smiley face. "What's your name, anyway?"

The words TEXAS INSTRUMENT appeared on its face, and Michelle could not suppress her laugh. If push really came to shove, she could probably **use** an 'instrument' commonly associated with Texas, preferably with a large caliber and a speed-loader. But that was her big brother's thing, just as the arts were her big sister's.

"All right, Tex," Michelle said, "I really want to ask you a whole bunch of questions but I don't have time." Michelle was starting to get a feel for this place's underlying logic. The dancers demanded that she dance, because of course they did. Her old gluestick turned into the Gluesword, because of course it would. The calculator fell over due to a simple logic attack, because of course it would- and of course it would be able to answer questions about physics, which were math. "Actually, wait, do you know any song-spells?" The number 0 appeared once more. "Oh well. Take care. Keep your batteries charged!", she shouted as she walked away, waving a gloved hand. The calculator showed an LCD heart as she continued onwards. "Do **you** know any song-spells?" she asked Sirale.

"Sorry, I don't," Sirale replied.

"Any verbal spells?" She probably wouldn't need him to cast any, but it might be immediately useful information.

"Sorry, magic just isn't my thing," Sirale replied cheerfully, and Michelle just had to correct him.

In a single movement, she grabbed him with telekinesis and scooped him up in her arms. He was exactly as heavy as she'd expected - the weight of a plushie his size in the lower gravity. "You have **no organs**. You're basically a monster. Magic has to be your thing, because you cannot **possibly** be animated through Type 0 non-magical physics." A Type 0 was a theoretical universe that had absolutely no magic and no method of interdimensional travel, the sort of universe that humanity thought it was living in before Asriel shattered the barrier. Michelle was unconvinced as to whether such a universe could actually exist- it could not be proven either way- but she was very glad that she didn't live in such a horrible place.

"Hmm, I guess you're right!" Sirale chirped. "It's okay if you want to carry me!" he continued instead of thinking about what Michelle had meant. She actually did want to carry him, but she reluctantly, gently set him down. It was embarrassing, wanting to carry a plushie at the age of twelve (and a rememberer since she was nine!), but her worries were getting to her. Was she saying the right things? Was she asking the right questions? Was it really the wisest decision to avoid drilling down into the physics immediately? Everyone always told her that she was a genius, that she sometimes thought in ways that no one else thought - but what she was terrified of the most was that maybe she wasn't smart, wise, quick-witted, or logical **enough**.

It wasn't long before she started wondering where everyone was. There were hallways past orange trees, and even a couple of treasure chests that had already been opened, and what looked like a puzzle that the creator hadn't had time to finish, with complicated mechanisms visible. (Michelle realized that it wasn't nearly as complicated as the one that she'd started with, and so didn't feel like she was missing anything.) The idea that Sheila and Flapper had simply killed the locals- and presumably earned EXP in the process- disturbed her greatly. If Sheila had earned EXP and this world had a Chara, there was going to be very bad times ahead. But the only destroyed thing that Michelle could see was a few crumbs from a cake that had been well and thoroughly devoured.

Michelle's first thought when hearing several voices united in song was that they were celebrating something; a split second later, she realized what had to be going on. She cast invisibility on herself, but she dispelled it seconds later; it wasn't stopping her from glowing the way things did here. "No, no, no!" Sheila was shouting in that strange, musical tone, and as Michelle peered around the corner she did a quick who's-who. That must have been the old Speak N' Spell from when she was very little, but she couldn't actually make it speak spells as it had been made long before the barrier went down; there were two animated chairs on which mouselike cartoonish creatures sat; there was a tall grandfather clock with a face and a pendulum, both of which seemed to be sapient; there was a flock of Flappers, only considerably smaller and a bit more scruffy-looking; there was a very frazzled-looking chef with a moustache and a yellow, triangular body. Sheila herself was standing in front of them as a military commander, waving around a long trident, the bladed prongs covered in nasty-looking hooks. "First off, pick an octave and stick to it," Sheila angrily rasped. "It doesn't matter what octave you sing in, but you have to pick one." _Noted._ "The next one of you who gets a single note wrong, I'm going to punish! Now, from the top!"

Michelle decided to interrupt before Sheila started hurting Darkners in earnest. "Um, Sheila, what are you teaching them to sing?" The Darkners looked at Michelle as if they were silently begging her to rescue them.

"Oh. It's **you**." Michelle had never imagined that Sheila, so shy just a few minutes ago, could sing words with such venomous hate, especially since her survival outfit was speckled with cake crumbs. "I'm building an army, **dunce**. We're going to sing the Queen to the ground, and then we're going to rip her apart." The voice itself sounded ripped apart, a hideous blend of vocalizations and rasping. At once, Michelle realized what she was doing - or, rather, who she was imitating. Her teachers must have been this strict; thrust into a position of sudden freedom and power, she knew no better way than to act like them. "Where's **your** army?"

"I didn't think to bring one," Michelle admitted. She would never have considered it. "The Darkners I met don't sing and probably can't cast my magic, anyway."

"Oh. Right. The dancers. Those **machines**." Sheila **hmph** ed in the boldest way she could, and Michelle tried not to smile at the comic absurdity. Sheila put a finger to her chin in mock thought. "How about this? If you get on your knees and grovel before your new Queen, I'll let you live in my castle, **princess**." Michelle didn't always understand other people when she was growing up. Asriel had taught her that sometimes to really understand what people wanted, you had to listen to what they were saying behind what they were saying. It took a while for Michelle to get it- her family didn't do that sort of thing, and of course she didn't have Asriel's hearing- but she'd figured it out years ago. What she was hearing behind Sheila's words was not even haughtiness, anger, or even contempt; it was raw emotional release. _Intense daily pressure, plus a sudden shift to another universe, plus a sudden feeling of power, equals this._ She really wished it was as simple as math. In a flash, she considered her options.

The first thing she thought of was to gently tell Sheila that neither she nor her whole 'army' had any power over her. They didn't seem like they were really into this, and she was certain she could send them all running with a basic light show and maybe a couple of carefully aimed warning-shot fireballs. Sheila herself could be stopped by- and that was where Michelle discounted the idea, because pretty much every future she could think of from that point involved directly attacking Sheila's throat, whether through telekinesis, a literal flying kick, or some horrible use of the Gluesword.

The second was to simply do as Sheila asked, and theatrically get on her knees. She wasn't sure what the immediate future of that would be, but she knew what it would be in the long term: utter mortification on Sheila's part. Michelle could laugh it off within hours, but Sheila would probably never be able to live it down, and Michelle really didn't want to do that to her.

"Why don't you ask me to join your army instead?" Michelle suggested, gesturing with the Gluesword if only to prove that she had a weapon. "I know you don't like this," she continued, holding up her phone in her other hand, "but it makes me the only person here who can sing exactly like you do. They're... not going to be able to do that." She gestured at the assembled Darkners, who seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief. Trying to get that old Speak N' Spell to sing well enough for magical purposes was just cruelty.

"Oh? **That's** your application to join my army? Your little singing device? I don't know where you're from, but you have nothing but stupid tricks here." _I really hope she doesn't remember saying this stuff later. She's going to hate herself for it._

"That's not true!" Sirale said brightly. "Michelle's really smart, and she dances really well, and she's really nice to Darkners, and she remembers us all the time!" Michelle glared at Sirale but didn't know how to tell him that he wasn't helping in a way that wouldn't make things worse.

"There are many things we Darkners want," Flapper rhymed, "but to be known, be remembered- that's at the front."

"I remember all my toys, too," Sheila sang-rasped. "But that's all you are. It's all **I** was." She looked around at the motley group, obviously feeling that trying to make Darkners into an army was a mistake. "I'm just... I'm going to undo all this," she rasped, "but before-"

"I can do it too!" Michelle blurted out immediately. They both looked at each other in surprise, and Michelle got closer to her alternate. Out of the corner of her eye, Michelle saw some Darkners taking the opportunity to quietly slink off. "The light you thought that only you could see, right? I have it too. I was about to do it before you healed me. I didn't think it was possible for two people to have DETERMINATION in one universe."

Sheila's eyes went wide. "Is **that** what this is?" she rasped. "That's its true name?"

"Have you heard of it?"

"DETERMINATION is the curse of eternal life," Sheila rasped. "Anyone who has it is doomed to endless suffering, never to know the sweet release of oblivion." She sounded like she was reciting something, and she was trembling a bit.

Michelle was outraged by the idea that not dying was a bad thing but chose a different angle. "Who do you think taught you that and why?" she asked instead. "The same people who taught you not to talk?"

"But you **can't die** as long as you have it, right?" She used her vocal cords this time, in distinctly non-musical ways.

"Yeah. Can we not test this, or get into some sort of weird loop between the two of us? I don't know how the time here relates to my home and I really do want to go home." They looked at each other's glowing faces, and Michelle abruptly wondered just how bright a hall of mirrors would get in this place. "I also really want to know who taught you that. Does your home universe have it?"

"No! Nobody where I am can do it, that's part of why it's a... that's why it's **called** a paradise," she croaked out. She was trembling more, and Michelle figured that her reserve of 'being able to deal with this' was running out. Michelle's own reserve was basically limitless- it was who she was- but her alternate clearly did not have that ability cultivated.

"Sheila," Michelle said very, very gently, "the same people who taught you that not dying was bad were the ones making your life bad." Something struck her as incongruous. "Does the healing song just not work on aging or cancer, or...?" Michelle's homeworld had largely solved such things with technology aided by chirurgery. Asriel could, and did, wipe out brain tumors and destroy arterial plaque within minutes.

"I don't know what either of those are," Sheila whispered, causing Michelle's thought process to jackknife sharply. "People go when it's their time to go."

"Do people just die of **nothing** where you live?"

"No.. my dad decides when it's time for people to go."

"And he obviously controls that world," Michelle replied. "So your dad basically told you that him murdering people was the natural order of things because he was the one murdering them. Just like he plans to murder **you** one day."

Michelle was expecting some sort of half-baked defense, but Sheila started sobbing instead, causing Flapper to flap her wings in surprise and Sirale to walk up to offer a hug, but Sheila shoved the little goat away with the haft of her trident. Michelle was wholly unsurprised; Sheila had been undergoing so much emotional strain in the past fifteen minutes that Michelle was surprised she hadn't already fallen apart completely. Still, band-aids were best ripped off completely and quickly.

Michelle gently put her hand on Sheila's shoulder, looking her in the face, noting the facial similarities despite the strange eye color and the disturbingly half-translucent skin. "Sheila, look at me. You don't have to go back there. You want to stay here or come home with me, either's fine. The only thing you'd have to worry about is the gravity, and we can deal with that. I get it, you're jealous of me and I don't blame you. But let's just get through this without breaking any of our toys or something worse. I need your help, and I'm pretty sure you need mine."

"You must think I'm a brat," Sheila rasped abruptly, the last word sounding almost crowlike.

"I think that you've escaped from a bad situation into a weird one, and everything you were taught to believe has basically collapsed, and you're really not prepared for this. And the only reason **I'm** prepared is because people have prepared me. C'mon. Let's go take over the world." Sheila smiled and suddenly hugged both her and Sirale, careful to avoid catching them on her weapon's hooks, and Flapper bowed her large head and was able to carry all three of them into the sky.


	6. Eagles into Mordor

_Why didn't they fly the eagles straight into Mordor?_

This question had been asked in Michelle's Critical Thinking class. Everyone there had been assigned _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_ in previous classes, so everyone understood the nature of the argument. A boy in Michelle's class had articulated the obvious objection before she could: 'Because their enemy was a giant flaming eye on a tower!' Further discussion had followed about what Sauron had and what he could know or see, but the original objection had stuck.

Michelle didn't quite realize why she was thinking of that until she realized where she was and where she was heading.

"Flapper, land," she demanded, not bothering with pleasantries. "We don't want to come in from above."

Flapper twisted her head around, almost owl-like, to look at the girls on her back while still flying forward. "The air is my home; why on the ground should we roam?"

"It's also your mother's!" Michelle replied, annoyed. "Sheila, can you fly? How long?"

"The Song of Flight is difficult and tiring," Sheila rasp-sang as Flapper reluctantly came down for a landing in a clearing among the orange trees. The castle was visible, which made Michelle worry - _if we can see them, they can see us_.

"It's like that for me, too, and I don't even have to sing to do it," Michelle replied. The way it worked, energetically, was probably similar. "I'm sorry, Flapper, but there's no way we can fight her up there. She'll tear us apart. She's not stupid."

"To not fight her aloft is strategically sound," Flapper replied, her glassy eyes looking directly at Michelle as she hopped off her back, "but by what means shall you fight her from ground?"

"Targeted Song of Flight, reversed," Sheila replied, talking more normal, and Michelle was amazed at how much like her she sounded. "But it's... she needs to be close." That worked the same way as well. Magical strength decreased inversely with the square of the distance. It was likened to things like levers and gravity. By the time Sheila was able to target her in the air, they'd already be attacked- and invisibility didn't work here.

"Can **any** song be reversed?" Michelle asked. Michelle could read the expression on the other girl's face as she reluctantly nodded: _that_ _ **would**_ _be the first thing you'd think of, wouldn't it?_

"The Song of Flight is how I just flew," Flapper added, "but at a pitch that is silent to you." Sheila was amazed and delighted, the first time Michelle could recall her ever being either of those things. _For that matter, maybe I should be amazed and delighted too; I'm in a reversed-light universe among orange trees, purple grass, and weird monsters, after all._ She discarded the thought. It didn't suit her.

"You can do super-high singing - and talk at the same time!" Sheila whispered joyfully. She looked at Michelle and Sirale bright-eyed as if she had made the world's best scientific discovery. "Can you sing more than one song at a time?" Michelle realized that she was the catalyst for this girl's entry into a world in which she was allowed, even encouraged, to figure things out and understand them, and that she was having the time of her life in the process of doing that.

"Singing and talking are two different things. My beak is for speech; my pump lets me sing." This made perfect sense to both of the girls, although for different reasons. Sirale simply nodded.

"I don't mean to rain on your parade again," Michelle said evenly, "but first off, if you can do it, so can the Queen. Second off,"

"A bunch of your machines can do it," Sheila interrupted in a harsh rasp. "I guessed."

"I was actually going to say that if I had the right pitch-shifting software on here, and I know you don't know what that is, I could do it with just this. The hardware, again I know you don't know, can record and play back anything you can hear. And some things you can't." That was just her phone. Sheila was simply nodding along, and Michelle wondered if she would be amazed or depressed by the amount of technology that could be developed to suit her universe, and possibly vice versa. _I haven't even asked if there's a Song of Repair yet..._ Later. Current business first. "Flapper, have you seen any other Darkners between here and there?"

"Other than Darkners assembled at our previous rally, I would count only two as the tally." Not enough, not nearly enough. The Queen was pulling back her forces, knowing very well that the heroes of legend had little choice but to come to her. "As for what else our flight has involved, we have left three puzzles unsolved."

"We should come back and solve them later!" Sirale said, and Sheila looked at him a bit askance.

"Yup, after all this is over," Michelle agreed, to Sheila's surprise. "C'mon. This universe was literally made for us. We don't have time now, but it'd just be rude not to do it later." Assuming she could ever return to this universe, of course.

"Rude to whom?" Sheila sang-asked pointedly, and nobody knew.

It was not long before they saw the castle. Michelle's mom had told her and her siblings of the time that she'd had a room in the Cinderella Castle at Disney World (her dad had not been himself at the time); Michelle could easily have done the same thing at some point in her life but had chosen not to. Spending time in somewhere like that would be too weird, and she got an even worse sense of weirdness looking at the castle in the distance with its giant fountain pulsating into the ceiling some indefinable distance above. Something was wrong with the castle; it looked like some of the walls were buckled in weird ways, the crenellations at the top somehow disjointed, the walls covered in faint, unreadable printed letters. There were no Darkners in view, just a straight, level path from them to the castle; Sheila looked visibly nervous, and chose to stay on Flapper's back as the great bird took ostrich-like steps to their destination, and Sirale stayed very near to Michelle as if for protection.

It was only when they were nearly inside the archway that Michelle realized what she was actually looking at. The castle was made of cardboard. The buckling was creases. The disjointed crenellations were damaged with folds. The unreadable printed letters were simply the word CASTLE repeated at an angle, all up and down the sides of the walls. The wrongness made her shudder in fear, and something else was wrong, why didn't she see any Darkners-

The voice was raw malice that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Michelle had never heard anything so hateful, so vicious, so rich with the promise of death and destruction. Even her father, at the worst she'd ever seen him in assorted infamous videos, didn't sound like this. She'd heard of the term "from Hell" before but never truly understood what that meant.

"Two Lightners, two rebels  
All fallen from grace  
Profaning, defiling  
this once-sacred place  
You vermin would fain  
take over my space?  
I'm going to wipe out  
your whole sordid race."

And with that, the Queen and a lot of Darkners- paper dolls and stuffed animals armed with rifle-crayons and machinegun-pencils- stepped forward out of the darkness, encircling them. They looked terrified, like they had no interest in fighting, but the Queen had clearly followed the rule of "be more scary to your troops than the enemy is".

Sheila gasped audibly, intaking a deep breath, and Michelle's sense of wrongness abruptly disappeared. She was in danger, and _in danger_ could never mean anything but _think and act quickly_.

 _Okay, there_ _ **is**_ _a kind of invisibility that works here._ Michelle realized what it was, then mentally kicked herself for not downshifting her own photons into the infrared, then realized that it wasn't too late for that. The Queen was probably going to give some kind of rhyming command of 'seize them' or, more likely, 'kill them' (she was, after all, not stupid), but before anyone could do anything else, Michelle's genetically engineered reflexes already had her hand on her phone and long practice had her pressing the right buttons without needing to look.

The first rapid-stutter of magic syllables was for a light show. This was the sort of thing she introduced performances with, and it needed fog to really work well for its purposes. Her uncle had been very clear that she was never to aim these sorts of things at people; these were fifteen 20-watt lasers, after all, a power that would tire her out very quickly. She danced the lights across the assembled Darkners' faces, causing them to recoil in fear, blindness, and confusion; a few bullets were aimed at them, but they were of the slow variety, and Michelle telekinetically pulled the extremely startled Sirale out of the way and used the flat of the Gluesword to block them from hitting Flapper. The second was something that Michelle concocted within three seconds: downshift-photons, width eight meters, enough to cover all of them in flight. With both of her hands occupied, she grabbed Sirale with her mind and leapt onto Flapper with him, and while the Queen was singing the reversed Song of Flight, Sheila was singing the Song of Flight in a pure, defiant tone, and Flapper did not need to be told to get out of there at once. The Queen followed, screeching- and Michelle formed a too-large fireball right out of the tip of her nose and telekinetically rocketed it straight into her face.

Michelle's vision swam, and patterns began to form in it. She felt like she was drowning and started hyperventilating, but it wasn't oxygen that was the problem, and she knew it. _Don't pass out don't pass out don't pass out..._ She did not pass out, but with her face buried in Flapper's feathers, she had no idea where they were, and she could not make out what the Queen was screaming at them.

"So we flew to the castle after all," Sheila and Sirale said as one as they landed, and then looked at each other and smiled.

"'Go scour the country' had come from her beak; this, therefore, must be the last place she'll seek."

"I'm double sorry," Michelle groaned, willing herself to act, to move. "Sorry for not realizing how we could be invisible and sorry for walking us into a trap."

"You are correct to give such things voice," Flapper consoled her, "but we had to come here; we had no choice."

"You got us out of the trap," Sheila rasped, and her voice dropped into an outright snarl. "And that **bitch** thought she could outsing **me**." Certain competing spells could wind up being a contest of wills in Michelle's home universe; she wasn't surprised that it was the same in Sheila's.

"Perhaps this is a fight we can avoid," Sirale suggested. "The fountain is right there; let's go before she's annoyed." He didn't realize why everyone was laughing at first. "Oh, Flapper! Now you've got me doing it, too!" Michelle and Sheila looked at each other and smiled. They'd needed that.

Up close, the fountain pulsated, oozed with lighted blackness, dark energy, and other things that Sheila had no conceptions of and that Michelle's worldview told her should not exist. Michelle's exhaustion slowly faded away, replaced with curiosity. The fountain was a key, a nexus, a node, a thing that did not exist in her home universe where all particles and spatial regions were created equal. The lighted things, the Darkners, even the Glowshard and Gluesword she still carried, even the lighted purple grass, orange trees, and pitch-black walls, the first castle and Sirale, even the cardboard castle and the Queen and daughter who lived there- all could be explained as being sensible for the environment she was in, even if some of it was disturbing and creepy. It belonged there, according to the apparent rules. The fountain was different, in appearance and kind. It followed different rules, ones that her magic class hadn't (yet) covered in detail. Was it a power source? A source of anti-entropy? Raw magic incarnate, which also didn't exist in her home universe? _If I laser it, what will happen? If I pull on it, what will happen? If I throw something into it, what will happen? If I stick my hand in it, what will happen?_

But they didn't have time for such questions. "Okay, what do we do with it?" she asked, the boring, prosaic question she had to ask. She was really getting sick of being exhausted, of being pulled along by necessity and chased by monstrosities. She wanted to spend time here, lots of stress-free time where she could just **play** with things instead of needing to find the most banal, obvious things to do because she'd be killed and have to go all the way back otherwise. Necessity was the mother of invention, but its motherhood was much like the Queen's.

Sheila looked like she was going to give a suggestion but Flapper spoke up first. "We haven't the time to discover or learn; there flies my mother, now nears her return."

"Down the stairs!" Michelle and Sheila snapped simultaneously, and they all ran like scared mice down into the guts of the castle. It wasn't until Michelle noticed the claw-scratches in the cardboard that she realized that she would not be able to use fire or lasers without risking a conflagration - although she wasn't sure how quickly the Queen could heal herself, anyway. She looked at the Gluesword in her hand and the hook-trident in Sheila's hands and understood how they were supposed to deal with this.

 _Now, what's the way we're_ _ **not**_ _supposed to deal with this?_


	7. You Are What You Do

They were not pursued by screaming or rhyming, but they fled all the same. There was no sense in keeping up that pseudo-invisibility; the black sphere would only make them more visible against the faintly glowing cardboard.

The staircase was wide enough for the Queen, and the throne room they entered looked like nothing so much as a nest. Twigs with orange leaves on them were arranged in a bowl shape in the center of the room. The walls, floor, and even ceiling had been heavily scratched and scored, revealing a rough, black surface, and more of this surface was visible as they continued to flee.

Another large staircase continued to the castle's center, which was wide open, clearly meant for the Queen's use. It was almost like an office building in its architecture; levels of empty, narrower stairs surrounded this open area, many doors facing the center. _Panoptical_ , Michelle thought. Anyone in the middle could see everything going on. If it weren't a dark world, it'd probably be light, open, and airy; as it was, it simply made it very difficult to hide, and as the group looked down at the Darkners returning into the castle, they knew they'd soon be spotted unless they found somewhere to go.

A narrow hallway, fifteen feet long and about fifty feet from the large stairs, looked promising, almost too promising. "Before we go down there, I want to know what this stuff is," Michelle said, halfway ducking down into it, trying to determine whether or not they were about to walk into a trap.

"What, the rough paper?" Sheila asked.

"No, that's cardboard, I know that stuff. What's underneath it?"

"That's boiled leather. Rawhide." Sirale made a faint sound of disgust, but Michelle was disturbed for other reasons. Being in a building made of cardboard and hardened animal skin was bad enough, but rawhide was the stuff that you gave dogs as chew toys.

"Come, children," a gentle, elderly voice called, opening a hidden door at the end of the hallway. The voice was utterly familiar to Michelle, and with a start she knew who it would be even before she saw him. Her overtired brain reacted with _it_ _ **can't**_ _be him_ before she rallied and realized _of_ _ **course**_ _it's him_. He was the stereotype of a wizard, a stereotype that had come and gone long before Michelle was even born: large conical hat with a bent tip, four-foot beard, gnarled cane, heavy robes, the works. He was illustrated on the cover of a puzzle book, and Michelle could recall the exact moment when she'd opened the Christmas present when she was five; it was a gift from Asmodeus, the wizard who had first introduced her mother to human magic. She'd fantasized that the wizard on the cover had been the one to give her the puzzles in that hundred-page book, which she'd utterly annihilated well before her sixth birthday roughly six months later. He'd given her more difficult puzzlebooks later- all of which she'd completely crushed well before she was supposedly old enough to do that- but they didn't have wizards on their covers, and she'd continued to pretend that this wrinkly stereotype had been the one to give them to her.

"Auzen," she said, running down the hallway, the others close behind her. She had never spoken his name aloud before; he didn't have one, so she'd given him one. "I'm sorry about skipping your puzzles, and I promise I'll go back and do them when I have time."

"I hadn't imagined that those would be your first words to me," the kind, patient voice said (for in the younger Michelle's imagination, he was always kind and patient, encouraging her to do the things he had created), "but I accept your apology all the same. Even though we both know what I am." He seamlessly closed the door behind Flapper, and his room was much like Sirale's, only his was full of all sorts of arcane knick-knacks, physics toys, diagrams, and a pendulum that sat utterly still and motionless in the center of the room.

He looked down at Sirale, who was looking back up at him with a slightly confused expression; Auzen looked so very much like a Lightner, after all, even though aging had been abolished on Michelle's world for more than a decade. "Do you know what you are?"

"He **kind of** does, and I've actually been trying to avoid that," Michelle replied before Sirale could say anything. "I'm sorry, I need to get home soon, and the Queen's still out there, and we don't want to have to LOAD, so can we just acknowledge that you're toys come to life and save the existential crises for later?"

"You must have time to recover," Auzen said in a tone that reminded Michelle of her actual monstrous grandfather. "You're tired and your blood sugar is low. Eat. Relax. The Queen, clever as she may be, will not find you here." The chair to which he gestured was very well cushioned and comfortable, and the thick, rich bread in front of her smelled freshly baked ( _with what flour?_ ); she briefly considered the idea of poison before discounting it and deciding to eat, sitting down with the Gluesword across her lap, the other three following her lead, Sirale taking dainty bites while Flapper gulped down the small loaves. There was no chance- absolutely none- that an Auzen this faithful to her mental ideal would actually be loyal to the Queen. Whatever the catalyst for this 34(b) was, it wasn't that kind of troll.

"They're more than toys. These ones are **us** ," Sheila said, trying to sound like talking normally was normal for her, and Michelle knew that she was right. "Flapper isn't just my friend. She's part of me." She looked downcast. "So is the Queen." She looked at Michelle instead of explaining just what parts of herself the Queen was, and Michelle understood, and nodded, and changed her view of something very important. "He's your kindness," ( _I'm not the really kind one, that's Gary_ , Michelle instantly thought) "and he's the way you do things," she said, gesturing to Sirale and Auzen in turn. Sirale looked moderately shaken by the revelation but did not disagree.

"My rationality," Michelle said. Auzen, alone of all the Darkners, would **have to** know, or rapidly discover, the truth. She looked up at him, and in a fraction of a second, half an unspoken conversation passed between them. Despite what he looked like and what his mannerisms were, he was her creation, her aspect, her imaginary friend. It was almost a blasphemy to someone from her home universe. Monsters arose from humans, but human beings were incapable of intentionally creating them.

"Yes, that. So where's your bad stuff? Where's your pain? Do you **have** any?" The voice turned musical with mild indignation.

"No, I actually don't," Michelle replied somewhat guiltily. She motioned Flapper over and petted the big bird with one hand, gently feeling the soft feathers above her cloth skin and the soft feathers beneath it, feeling their texture, their density, and Flapper faintly crooned at the gentle treatment. No, she hadn't deserved to be burned, not at all. "I told you I was a princess. I don't think I really explained what that means in my world." She was too tired to feel embarrassed, and knew it. She knew she was going to have to do another magical sprint soon; she didn't want to wear herself out with emotions and really hoped that Sheila wouldn't react badly to this. "Mom, Dad, Uncle Azzy, Grandma and Grandpa... they make sure that all six of us know about those things and can handle them, but we don't actually experience too much of them." She looked at Sheila, and fortunately the other girl didn't see the point of getting upset anymore, choosing instead to pet Sirale the way Michelle was petting his counterpart. The fluffy goat did not mind, either. "Sometimes people like me make things like that happen to themselves, but we're all too smart to do that. Thank Dog, too, because we would **not** want an evil version of **him** ," she said, gesturing to Auzen, who bowed slightly. "By the way," she asked him, gesturing at the cardboard-and-rawhide walls, "why is this place so obviously a lie?"

Auzen nodded subtly, as if acknowledging that she was asking the right question. "From your Darkners, I would imagine that your stories were all crafted propaganda that you've seen through long ago," he said, looking at Sheila, who simply nodded, "and you, well... is there any story in front of you that you don't take apart?" The voice was gentle, but it was almost like an accusation.

"No," Michelle replied evenly. "You know that better than anyone. And I'm **in** this one. I actually have a giant bird trying to kill me. If more people took apart the stories they were in, I think Mom, Azzy... probably Grandpa, even Dad would have a lot less to worry about." Auzen smiled, the way she'd always envisioned him smiling when she figured something out, and she wondered if he was actually wise or simply an echo of what she wanted to hear.

"I think my dad would have a lot more," Sheila quietly rasped.

"Oh yeah, I'll just tell you now, he's basically already dead now that I know he exists," Michelle replied in the same even tone. Every head in the room turned to look at her. "I'm sorry, I didn't want to make things worse by telling you before. My dad's job is to go between universes, wiping out versions of himself. He's one of the very few Charas who wound up being good" _within a flexible definition of 'good'_ "and he... he's atoning by getting rid of the bad ones. I won't tell you what he's atoning for, you can just find that out later. Well, whoever here **still exists** can." Auzen solemnly nodded, but he was the only one who picked up on that part. Sheila looked like she was going to say or sing something but had neither the words nor the notes. "Overpowered," Michelle said. "The word you're looking for is overpowered. My whole family is. And we don't play roles, or act like people think we're supposed to act, we just find out what needs to be done and then we do it." Her parents had given her the talk of the capital-R Responsibilities of a Dreemurr princess only a couple of years ago. It was almost completely unnecessary.

"And it is that philosophy that trivializes almost everything," Auzen acknowledged. "But beware. You are not the most overpowered one here," he declared. "If you choose to employ any means at your disposal, under the circumstances, **I** certainly cannot blame you, nor can I blame any of you for wanting to do the same. But your forthrightness and your curiosity will lead you directly to things that are considerably more powerful than you."

"Gaster," Sheila said.

"There is no need to court disaster by directly facing one such as Gaster," Flapper croaked out, barely remembering to keep her voice down.

"No. If it were him, this would be different. **I** would be different," Auzen said, and suddenly Michelle realized what he was talking about.

"There's a **creator entity** in here with us?" she replied, forcibly keeping her emotions in check, and Auzen nodded again. There were few things that could make her react like that, but an actual creator was one of them. Her classes hadn't gotten to that part yet, but she'd skipped ahead in the book as usual, reading about all the wild and wooly entities, sub-entities, and not-quite-entities roaming among and between the universes. A rigorous classification system like the kind used for universes hadn't yet been developed, but a self-aware entity capable of creating even this little 34(b) was decisively a god. Or a Dog.

The idea that she might actually doom or save her own entire universe by her actions in this place put everything into stark contrast. No, she really, really had no use for going along with things or playing roles at all today.

"This isn't part of the prophecy," Sirale said, a somewhat worried inflection in his voice, but he swiftly changed back into his usual chirpy self. "but that's not going to stop us. We're heroes, after all!"

"I am not," Auzen said. "No, Princess, as much as you may eschew roles, my role is as it was defined by you, so long ago. I know you've thought it, and your guess is correct; I don't actually know any more than you do, save for a few things from my all-too-recent origin here." He smiled his kindly, wizened smile, and Michelle knew it for what it was, and it was so terribly, terribly sad. _He's a lie, too, and he knows he's a lie._ Perhaps this was why intentionally creating monsters was impossible; perhaps Dog was more merciful than to allow this. _Which would mean that the local creator isn't Dog._ "It lies hidden in the basement, in the very deepest part of the castle, in a prison of its own making. My advice is to assume nothing about it. And do not let the Queen know. She has been searching for it as well."

"I thought the Queen just hated us," Sheila said, redoubling Michelle's opinion of the creature.

"She wishes to alter things," Auzen said. "I do not know if it is possible, but she intends to employ this entity to change the rules so that all Lightner-created objects- over a certain size, I assume- will be alive there, as they are here. All loyal to her." Michelle gasped, her hands briefly shaking.

"She's going to take over everybody's **things**?" Sheila asked, perplexed and disturbed.

"Sheila, you don't understand, you don't live in the modern world, if she can actually do that, she'll take over **all our weapons** -" How could she possibly explain what nuclear missiles were? "My whole world will burn. **Billions** of people will die, and Mom might not be able to undo it. We have to go. We have to go **now**."

"I hope to see you all again... assuming, as you said, that I still exist," Auzen said. "Now, how will you get to your destination, not knowing what lies between you and it?"

Perhaps he had expected some answer involving DETERMINATION, but Sirale, with his Asriel-like ears, helpfully informed everyone of what was going on outside instead. The Queen was standing at the top of the wide stairs, looking down at the searching Darkners, who were going up and down every hallway. More than one had passed by the hidden doorway. _Good. She's still obsessed with_ _ **us**_ _._

"I have a method," Michelle said, standing up. "Sheila, please... sing Flight for me, and accept what happens." Neither Sirale nor Flapper understood. Perhaps Auzen did, but he gave no sign. Sheila nodded. Michelle turned to Sirale, who was still so naive, so oblivious. "Is there a Darkner in the hallway?"

"Just... leaving... now," Sirale said, smiling.

Michelle threw open the door. Sheila ran behind her, singing the Song of Flight in her perfectly practiced voice, clutching her hooked trident with both hands. Propelled by Sheila's magical flight as well as her own, she rocketed towards the Queen at high speed, shining a bright violet light directly into the creature's face. The Queen screeched "YOU FOUL-" but whether or not she was going to rhyme was something that none of them would ever find out.

The Gluesword's glue was not used to stick the Queen. Nor was the hooked trident used to pin her down.

Instead, before Sirale, Flapper, any of the patrolling Darkners, or even the Queen herself realized exactly what was going on, Princess Michelle Dreemurr had already telekinetically seized the Queen by the head and clove straight through her neck with one two-handed swipe.


	8. Doing Cthulhu Things

Michelle had, of course, already formulated a plan for what she was going to do after she'd beheaded the Queen. Part one was ascertaining that the Queen was dead; part two was ascertaining if she'd earned EXP; part three involved quelling the certain outrage of Sirale and other Darkners.

Parts one and two were done in half an instant as she instantly felt the EXP flow into her. Her father had told her what it was like, of course, but it was an experience unlike anything she had felt, and she instantly understood how an unscrupulous person would want to seek more and more of this trans-real power. It was a boost, a gain, a heady rush - she estimated herself as LV 3, maybe - but she knew very well that it was a very, very bad thing. She immediately checked her mind for the presence of an invader, a Chara who would use her EXP to alter her thinking, but such a person did not exist here - or **she** was the local Chara and didn't know it. She considered casting the spell to have it removed from her system- on her homeworld, it was something that **everyone** had on their phones- but realized that she just might need it.

She turned back to the group just as the Queen's head had finished plummeting to the floor five stories below. Only Sirale was surprised, just as shocked as the Queen's former loyalists, most of whom had dropped their weapons; some stood in a state of shock; others simply ran away, openly or discreetly. Flapper looked downcast, but was nodding subtly. Sheila had known this was coming and just looked at the scene, the girl standing atop the decapitated bird, a shining steel sword in her hand. "I'm sorry, Sirale, but I absolutely had to do that," Michelle gently explained to the little goat while walking towards him, the sword held gently at her side, not yet caring about the other, terrified Darkners. "She was literally made from evil, she was trying to kill us, and if she had gotten what she wanted, I wasn't kidding when I said my whole world would burn."

Sirale was barely able to speak. Michelle wondered if he was even able to understand what she was saying or if his mind was so fixed that he could not even see the pragmatic point of view. "She would probably never have done that," he sadly said, and it was clear that Michelle had committed a great wrong in his eyes. "Not against Lightners and your power."

"My ballpark guess is thousands-to-one unlikely," Michelle replied, "but thousands aren't the billions she might have killed. And she was literally made of evil." Michelle glanced at Sheila, who only nodded.

"Are you prepared to live with the consequences?" Sirale asked, in a strangely off-kilter voice, and Michelle realized that he **did** understand, even if in a fundamentally alien way.

"I am," she replied. "I have to be. Otherwise, I'm not really being good, which means doing what's best for people. I'm just avoiding consequences." This was the fundament of her family's philosophy, something that had been drilled into her since even before she'd imagined Auzen. "C'mon. The thing down there made this place, so we have to face it before it does something else."

"My mother now lies dead at your hand," Flapper said with a distinct lack of sorrow. "Who, then, shall be in command?"

The political power vacuum of this 34(b) was far down in her list of immediate concerns. "We are," she replied, walking towards the nearest staircase. She'd remembered a few things her grandfather and dad had told her. "When something like this happens, Dad usually just puts somebody friendly from that universe in charge. We'll figure that out later. After we find the thing that made it." Flapped glided down to the bottom while the Lightner and Sirale went downstairs, Sheila walking carefully in the gravity she wasn't used to, a couple of Darkners scrambling to get out of their way. Something else was eating at Michelle, something odd, and it'd been eating at her before she'd gotten the EXP. This was a weird place, after all, and it was easy to get lost in that fact.

"Sheila, are you okay with this?" Sirale asked. Ah. That's what it was. Sheila was just as weird as the rest of them.

"Yeah, maybe this is a cultural thing," Michelle quickly added, "but you've been..." Michelle tried to be as least insulting as possible. "kind of adapting to things pretty quickly."

It turned out to be the right word. "I am okay with this, and a high adept songstress is perfectly adaptable," Sheila semi-musically explained, glancing at Michelle's dress. "You said you don't play roles. In my world, some people have permanent roles, but a high adept is supposed to be able to sing **any** song, play **any** role. Sometimes, the King writes scripts for us. Sometimes we have to make our own. If we don't know what we're supposed to do, then it's time for us to go. Or it was." She looked at Michelle. "I hope your dad kills him soon," she said in the same half-flat, half-musical tone. She turned to the little goat, who was predictably shocked. "He's much, much worse than she was."

Michelle's thoughts, as usual, leapt immediately to the why. It made a terrible sort of sense. As the unopposed ruler of his world, with no technology to speak of and few or no external threats to face, King Chara had to make his own fun. Having killed all the monsters, all he had to play with was people, and if they didn't or couldn't do what he wanted- which seemed to be anything he could think of at any time- he killed them. Rinse and repeat for a few hundred years (longer?), and what he wound up with was an emotionally stunted population with remarkably high adaptability and intelligence, even though he probably didn't even know the word 'eugenics'. Sheila had started this adventure as a meek, quiet girl because that was the role she usually played. A sharp emotional reaction had abruptly kicked her into an angry, drill sergeant-like role, one that she was glad to play because it freed her from her previous one. Then Michelle's influence had ushered her into a different role, and Michelle realized that Sheila was, consciously or unconsciously, trying to be as much like **her** as possible.

Michelle almost apologized - 'I'm sorry, I thought you were just reacting' - but the truth was that Sheila **was** reacting, and this was how she reacted. Being willing and able to change her outlook on life, an emotional and mental shapeshifter, **was** her true self. Michelle could not even fathom the strength of mind, the fundamental, low-level, unconscious mastery of self, that it would take to be something like that. Michelle changed her beliefs as new evidence came in. Sheila changed great parts of **who she was** \- with the exception of her ability to shift.

"Sheila, when this is all over, you'll be able to play any role you want," Michelle said firmly.

"I'm hoping for that," Sheila replied evenly.

Flapper was waiting for them, holding open a door- which seemed to be made of actual wood, in an archway of stone- with one wing. Above the door, just as the stone met the cardboard, were carved the words:

ABANDON NO HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.

"That's opposite," Sheila said, just as Michelle said "That's the other way around." They looked at each other, realizing why they shouldn't have been surprised. The Divine Comedy had been written long before Chara's birth.

"People still read that where you are?" Sheila asked.

"Yeah, it's old but really well-known," Michelle replied. "I've never actually read it, but everyone knows that part." Sheila just smirked ruefully; it was one of Chara's favorite lines. The glow of this world diminished as they walked down the stairs, solid stone gradually losing its color, feel, and texture, becoming the blank nothing that formed the walls of so much of this universe. Michelle got the feeling that she was descending into a sepulcher, some ancient tomb that held something very, very old.

 _That's bullcrap. This place was fashioned from nothing literally half an hour ago._ Somehow, that only made it scarier.

A fat door sat imposingly in front of them the bottom of the stairs, glowing in the same strange way as almost everything else here, made from wood from a tree that never grew. There was no handle, only three locks, and Michelle decided that knocking would be the best immediate choice. She raised her hand and felt a strange sensation that didn't quite seem to come from her; turning her head to Sheila, she saw the other girl touching a light, a light that only the two of them could see.

"Good choice," Michelle said approvingly. "Good place to drop a SAVE," she explained to the Darkners. She'd saved them even more than time if the Queen was a native rememberer, someone like Sans or Gaster who experienced DETERMINATION the way her parents and uncle did. "Okay, let's hope we can handle this." Her mind was awash in possibilities for what they were about to face. She judged that the likely consequences of confronting the creator of this place were only slightly better than the likely consequences of not confronting it. The thing was surely some sort of incredibly powerful intelligence, some uber-demon that rightfully belonged in Cthulhu-space doing Cthulhu things with the rest of the Cthulhus, the way most Cthulhus did. Leaving a thing like that alone, without even trying to deal with it? No. No, that wasn't wise at all. She tentatively knocked on the door, a single harsh rap. She would not need to knock twice.

"OH? THE PRISONERS SEEK TO BE FREE, FREE!" The voice sounded musical, insane, almost manic, which made Michelle's blood run cold, a sense of vertigo deeply overtaking her. The others weren't doing well, either, and Sheila looked terrified on a very deep level. _She's not roleplaying this time._ "BUT YOU WILL NEED KEYS THREE, THREE! THE FIRST IS IN-"

Michelle's next act was not strictly born of rationality. Even as she did it, she knew she was letting her desire for expediency, or perhaps curiosity, get the better of her. Yet, wasn't it the most tempting thing in the world to outwit a god? The mad clown on the other side of that door sounded like it might even appreciate the gesture. She simply put her hand to the door and telekinetically opened the locks. They were simple little things, a couple of crude tumblers in each, a child's idea of what an ancient lock might have been like; her fine control was well above the challenge. With a single push, the door swung open easily, as if its hinges were well oiled.

What lay beyond that room hurt their heads. The whole room, made of hideously garish purple rectangles, was spinning, spinning, floor and ceiling going in different directions, the walls completely askew in seemingly Lovecraftian, non-Euclidean ways, and yet somehow the four of them were not spinning along with everything else. The thing in front of them looked roughly like what Michelle had expected from its voice and power: a fifty-foot-tall wolflike hell-clown, a canine version of some sort of monster from an old, scary movie Michelle barely remembered watching, and it smiled at them with pointed teeth. She geared herself for battle- was it even possible to win against a thing like this? "WELCOME, WELCOME! WELL DONE! THE GORDIAN KNOT CHOPPED IN TWAIN, TWAIN! MICHELLE HAS USED HER BRAIN, BRAIN!" Michelle briefly wondered how it knew her name before realizing _of course it did_.

"Did Gaster tell you to make this?" Sheila blurted suddenly, which Michelle thought was wise; something this powerful would have no reason to lie.

"YES HE DID, DID! THE BLOB WITH THE HANDS, HANDS! BUT CAN YOU USE YOUR FEET, FEET? FEET OR TASTE DEFEAT!"

And then suddenly they were being attacked in all directions. Michelle expected it to toss everything at them, and it did: rifle bullets, feathers, sine waves, and a panoply of lasers came from every direction, and even at LV 3 Michelle was hard pressed to deal with it all. Everything was spinning, the patterns barely feasible to dodge, and Sirale choked out half a scream, Flapper croaked loudly, and Sheila screamed at such a high, pure tone that Michelle thought her skull would shatter like a wine glass-

And then, abruptly, they were back at their last SAVE point. Michelle was familiar with this. Sheila reeled briefly, her body and mind's experiences not matching up. "You get used to that," Michelle said. "We just LOADed after it attacked us and we lost," she explained to the confused Sirale and Flapper. She regretted not having the monster-targeted rememberer spell saved to her phone, but she couldn't ever have envisioned actually using a thing like that. "Of course we can't fight that thing. It can do anything. What did you **expect** would-"

And then she realized, in a sudden flash, just what it had been doing the whole time and how that alternate Gaster had gotten it to mostly do his bidding. She breathed in sharply, but her next words were easy to think up and very easy to say. "Okay, we're going back in there, but with completely different expectations of what it's going to do. It's reading our minds and acting accordingly."

"It does what we **want**?!" Sheila sang the words, unimaginably overjoyed, as if she'd won a thousand lotteries at once.

"No," Michelle replied. "It **mostly** does what we **expect** it to do. And it screws with our expectations. **Don't** expect it to do what you tell it, and **don't** expect it to do very much of anything you want; we don't know its limits, and we don't want to make it any more of a broken literal genie than it already is. You get the idea, right?"

"I've played corrupt-a-wish before," Sheila musically replied sadly.

"Yeah. And you two," she said, addressing the Darkners, "I don't know if it works just off us or if your thoughts matter here, but please do the same. Just expect it to want to help us because we expect it to want to help us." She would never, ever have imagined a world in which circular logic actually sustained itself, but she wouldn't have imagined a lot of things before she came to this place.

"Having a deity that meets expectations might offer revelations or perhaps tribulations," Flapper rhymed. "How do you conquer your own imagination?"

"That's what we've been doing this whole time," Sheila gently whispered, and the Darkners understood. Once again, Michelle magicked the door open, and the room was just as spinny as the first time.

The thing was no longer a wolf hell-clown. Rather, it was a doglike creature dressed up in a garish clown costume, some sort of jester version of Dog Himself. "YOU'VE FIGURED OUT MY SECRET!" it yelled, clapping its hand-paws and dancing around.

"What **are** you?" Sheila asked in three tones.

"I KNOW YOU'RE NOT USED TO ASKING QUESTIONS, BUT YOU CAN COME UP WITH SOME MORE FUN ONES THAN THAT!" it said, and that was something that Michelle hadn't expected. She guessed that it couldn't answer them because **they** didn't know how **it** would define itself.

"Do we disappear after the Lightners leave?" Sirale asked abruptly, and Michelle was very happy that the goat had a sense of self-preservation.

"NO, DON'T BE A SILLY BILLY GOAT! THIS WORLD'S FOR YOU FOREVER! AND ANY OTHER WORLD YOU CAN MAKE IT TO, TOO!"

Michelle had so much to ask and request of it but wanted to let this thing go ASAP. It was too dangerous to talk to for long, since one stray thought just might irrevocably destroy the reality they existed in - particularly since the questions she had were of the universe-altering variety. "Will you help us go to my home?"

"OF COURSE I WILL HELP YOU BE FREE, FREE! JUST AS LONG AS YOU FREE ME, ME!"

"Done," Sheila and Michelle agreed simultaneously.

"SUCH DELIGHTFUL YOUNG LADIES! THANK YOU, THANK YOU! GO TO THE FOUNTAIN AND SING OF HOME, HOME YOU SHALL BE! I HAVE A GIFT FOR YOU!" Before anyone realized it, a small golden token appeared in Sheila's hand; she'd expected one. "IT CAN CHANGE ONE RULE, RULE! SPECIAL OFFER FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY, ONLY VALID IN THIS 34(B)! NOW I WILL GO AND HAVE FUN, FUN! JOY TO YOU! JOY TO THE COSMOS!"

"Don't go anywhere with sapient thoughts in it," Michelle advised in an effort to stop anyone else's universe from getting wiped. "We're obviously just as dangerous to you as you are to us."

"THAT'S PRETTY GOOD ADVICE! I GUESS I'LL SEE YOU AGAIN WHEN YOU BECOME GODDESSES! TOODLES! DON'T BREAK ANYTHING!" Spacetime in the room contrived to fling them out the door they had came in, and then it was no longer a door but the same featureless black wall that characterized so much of this universe.

"This is probably better for you than me," Sheila whispered, handing Michelle the token, which she carefully placed into a pocket. It didn't look like much on first glance, just a simple coin with smooth edges (Michelle was very sure that it was as round as physically possible), but it had each of the girls' faces perfectly engraved on each side. Just the fact that it could be used for anything made it trans-magical, utterly beyond price. It shouldn't have been able to exist. "You know what rules to change. And that's your real power, isn't it? Knowing the rules."

Michelle nodded, looking at Sheila and the Darkners as well. "That's right. So many people think that impossible things are possible, and vice versa, because they don't know the rules. I guess you know what 'sing of home' means?"

Sheila nodded in return and pointed to Michelle's phone. Michelle began recording at once. Sheila's singing was pitch-perfect, of course, and Michelle recognized it; it was the song she'd been singing at the very beginning, when she was still playing the role of a timid girl. Sirale clapped his floofy hands loudly after Sheila had finished, and Flapper joined as well, her wings blowing their hair and clothes around.

"What does this actually do, normally?" Michelle asked as they walked up.

"Normally, it just lets you know how to get home," Sheila replied, yet another spell that Michelle couldn't have even imagined existed. "But it doesn't work between here and there."

"So that creator decided it should work in the fountain," Michelle replied.

"That was pretty smart of it," Sirale observed brightly.

"Oh, it's very, very smart, it has to be," Michelle explained as they ascended. "It has to know what quantum physics are and how they work to be able to copy base physics over. It has to know two different magic systems, and it had to be able to make up something new. It just can't think about other entities very well, I think it might have problems telling the difference between self and not-self. If it **could** , that Gaster would never have been able to control it. So, who wants to come home with me? This isn't goodbye either way, we'll find a way back, don't worry about that." A very large chunk of the US Department of Transdimensional Exploration would surely be on the job, right along with her world's Gaster and her own father.

"This world's in chaos, my mother's been killed," Flapper intoned. "Therefore, it's my duty to stay and rebuild."

"I want to see your world and everyone in it," Sirale chirped. "Thanks for staying, Flapper!"

"I don't want to stay here forever in this limited place," Sheila chanted after a bit of thought. "Even if everything is heavy and songs don't work."

They ascended back the way they came, and Michelle quietly applied a bit of telekinetic force to make the stairs easier on Sheila. The Queen's beheaded corpse was still where they had left it, and Michelle was mildly disturbed that it had not turned to dust as ordinary monsters did. She felt a pang of regret and remorse, but the Queen really had been made of raw hate. Through the throne room, up to the roof (Michelle briefly wondered if it could ever rain in this place), then back to the fountain. It still looked wrong and terrifying, a pulsating mass of _this really shouldn't exist_. But it really was the way home, for precisely that reason.

"Do I just think of home while casting this?" Michelle asked.

"Yes. Everything that makes home home. Think of where you want to be, who you want to be with." That last bit was rasped a bit low, and Michelle could tell that Sheila didn't exactly have many people who fit the bill.

"Okay. I think you ought to hold on to me for this. Sirale, uh, climb on my back." With Sheila's left hand on her right wrist, a fuzzy backpack on her back, the Gluesword still in her left hand, and the phone in her right hand chanting the Song of Home on repeat, Michelle thought of everything that made home home. She thought of her brothers and sisters, her mother, her grandparents, her uncle, and as she stepped through the fountain, she thought of her dad and what he'd have to say about all this.

The three of them stepped into a well-maintained quasi-medieval room. Feather dolls were neatly arranged along a shelf on the wall, and the down bed actually looked cozy. A series of cloth and linen dresses were hung up in a small closet. A handful of well-read books sat upon a desk, near a very well-used stand with sheet music plainly visible. The gravity was very light, although Michelle felt herself moving in ways that she wasn't used to, her innate telekinetic powers, powers that she had been using in conjunction with her muscles all her life, denied her.

And she felt a questing presence inside her mind, someone amazed that another human being with EXP had entered his domain.

" _ **OH F-**_ "


	9. No Coincidences

" _ **-OR THE LOVE OF DOG HOW DID WE GET HERE?!**_ " Michelle's outburst was matched by Sheila's confusion and visible horror along with Sirale's naked terror. The little goat was shaking, and Sheila and Sirale trying to hide behind each other would have been comic if not for the danger. Sheila's mannerisms had transformed straight back into the girl she'd been when Michelle had first met her, but instead of rasping she stayed dead silent, her eyes open wide.

Nearly tripping over herself in the low gravity and without the aid of her magic, Michelle opened the door and looked around. They were on a second-floor hallway, just off a main hallway that led to an ornate set of stairs that led down into a grand hall. The place was opulent in every respect, far more ornate than Michelle's home (yet far less livable) and she knew that she was in the home of the King even before he mentally informed her of it. He was smug, diffident, haughtily questing through her mind with a mixture of intrigue and outrage, unable to decipher most of the things it found there. _This heaven is incorruptible_ , it thought at her. _By my divine will I had made it so. My voice is the only one in this Angelic Chorus. What are you, creature, and how did you get here?_ It read her thoughts even through her raw terror; even at a mere LV 3, she was unable to hide them from it any more than she could hide them from herself. Killing the Queen had come with terrible consequences after all.

And then he was there, casually walking up the stairs and down the hall, wearing a wealthy man's silk shirt and his skin half-translucent in the same way as Sheila's, his curious expression matching his thoughts. She'd abandoned the idea of escaping him and instinctively retreated back into Sheila's room, managing to prise her own white-knuckled fingers off the Gluesword, holding her hands up in a gesture of surrender as Sheila, similarly disarmed, and Sirale quailed behind her. It didn't really matter; this was a full-powered Chara, and mere swords would be of no use against him. He wasn't going to kill her, he mentally reassured her - at least not right away. She was a novelty, after all, a thing from another universe that came with strange ideas and strange technology and strange magic, even if it didn't work here. He would pick through her brain at his leisure, learning what had been going on in the multiverse since he'd somehow created this personal paradise. Only then, if she was of no use to him, would he kill her as he did everyone else.

But there was a second presence inside Michelle's mind, one darker and deadlier yet oddly very familiar, and that was when Michelle remembered exactly who she had been thinking of as she walked through the portal.

There are no coincidences whatsoever in interuniversal travel.

Michelle looked up at the supernaturally strong, EXP-filled man in front of her, and her nervous face relaxed into an easy smile, the nearly bladder-voiding terror she'd felt evaporating as quickly as it had come, as Chara realized that there was another voice in his Chorus. A loud smash came from the bottom of the stairs, doors being torn off by something very, very strong, and Chara abruptly turned from the room, stepping out into the main hall to face the interloper. "You're already dead," she called after him. _Don't let him sing, Dad!_

 _Cover your ears and open your mouth_ , came the mental command in a surprisingly even, calm tone, and Michelle did not hesitate to obey, slapping her fingers into her ears and clumsily throwing herself on top of Sheila and Sirale.

Prince Charles Dreemurr, having absorbed bits of his alternates' power so many times before, did not even bother with the stairs. He did not have access to his familiar magic either, but he did not need it for what he was doing; Chara was unable to sing a single note before Charles had already leapt at him at more than the speed of sound, his foot tearing through the floor as he jumped, his body blasting through the railing and even the second floor as if it were made of water, his fist smashing into Chara's face at Mach 4 with a force that would have torn the turret from an Abrams battle tank. The outrage whipped through Michelle's mind just as the sonic boom smashed through her covered ears, and half an instant later, the wave of overpressure ripped the door off its hinges, toppled the dresser, smashed the window glass in a scattering of shards, sent everything on the walls crashing to the floor, popped the girls' ears, and nearly killed Sirale outright. Dust and splinters blasted through the room like a sandstorm. Chara was sent flying through the walls of the adjacent room with a loud crash that melded into the greater explosion, and Michelle thought _that's not right, even as a Chara his head should have exploded_. She heard screaming and wasn't immediately sure whose it was; it was Sirale, who abruptly stopped and curled up into a ball. Michelle wasn't prepared for this, Sheila wasn't prepared for this, but Sirale was never meant for this at all, a child's toy transported to a war zone.

"Why isn't he dead?" Michelle asked loudly, barely able to hear herself, and to her surprise Sheila was actually able to hear her.

"He has the Song of Invincibility on him, from below!" Michelle abruptly thought this to her father (instantly realizing that Charles and all his alternates could read each other's minds as well, and all the implications of that, in a split second), but Charles' solution was not to disturb whatever singers were in the basement but to simply carry his alternate out of range, tearing him to pieces before he got the chance to try anything. But that was only one of this Chara's bodies. A quick burst of thoughts from her father informed her that his other bodies, scattered around the planet, would band together, and sing together, and their minions would sing as well, and their total power was far greater than Charles', and he would be disabled and killed even though he could outpace sound itself.

They needed to get out of this universe **now**.

Picking up her spear, Sheila sang the Song of Healing for all three of them, Michelle's hearing returning, small flecks of glass and wood extricating themselves from her skin. "Do you know the song to get us out of here?!" Michelle asked very quickly, snatching up the Gluesword in a clumsy grab, and Sheila shook her head, still singing. "The library, where's the library?" Sheila shook her head again. Michelle had the idea that there was a hidden repository somewhere, a book full of universal travel and other forbidden spells, but of course that was wrong; a distributed entity with multiple brains had no real need of writing anything down, especially if he didn't want anyone else to read it.

And then Charles was right there, wearing a combat suit similar to Sheila's survival gear, his hands covered in red, his face completely neutral in the serenity of combat. He, too, picked her brain, in a methodical way. He'd once told her that her thoughts were unique among all of his children; she got the impression that he was proving himself right. "Michelle," he said out loud, "play the Song of Home and think about your thirty-four-bee as your home. The two of you, jump on." Thinking of that place as her home was not difficult- it was meant for her, after all- and despite her clumsiness in this world, Michelle was able to get her phone into her hand quickly. Sirale was paralyzed, but Sheila grabbed him with one hand and onto Charles with the other. Charles ripped the relevant song out of Chara's mind and sang in a loud, slightly off-key voice, and Sheila sang the Song of Home as well, and Michelle thought of the place she just was and nowhere else-

-and they were back on the castle roof, all four of them, and Flapper and a great many Darkners gasped in surprise. Flapper had chosen the rooftop as her mustering ground, to tell the assembled Darkners about the new order. Sirale still looked traumatized, but Michelle and Sheila breathed sighs of relief. "Dad, I'm so sorry, I had **no idea** that-" Michelle started, not even knowing if she had anything to apologize for.

"It's not over yet," Charles informed her in a blameless, almost casual tone. And then suddenly his eyes went wide, as the platform was filled with singing.

What he hadn't counted on was that Chara, in all of his bodies (Michelle couldn't count them all- it was something like **fifty** , crowded together on top of the castle-) could warp in while **already singing the Song of Paralysis against him** , their combined efforts overcoming even his mighty magic resistance and sending him to the floor in a nerveless lump. Focused, united, they continued their song, wishing his heart and lungs to stop and stay stopped. Flapper screamed, as did many Darkners, Sirale unable to process what he was seeing. Michelle's mind went into overdrive. What did she have? What could she possibly do? If she LOADed, her father would be ripped out of reality the same way her mother had ended those supposedly invincible godlings- she thought back in an instant- realized that she **did** have something- and then, in a flash of instant insight, she'd pulled the token from her pocket.

She did not waste time thinking of commands to give it in English. That would have been silly. Instead, she remembered what Gaster had told her once about impossible spells- symbol-combinations that made sense under the rules of magic but would not actually do anything. Attempting to alter the rules of the universe fell into that category.

Chara reacted, turning towards her, but Michelle had already said "EXP nullity" in two difficult-to-pronounce syllables, and then EXP did not exist within that 34(b) at that time, and she felt the power and the influence drain from her as Chara's distributed mind dissipated, and his separated bodies looked at her with pure hate.

Michelle knew in another half an instant that **things were going to get very, very violent**.

[no, seriously. it's a bloodbath. don't say i didn't warn you, kiddo.]

The nearest ones to her lunged, but Chara had been reliant on his supernatural power for hundreds of years, and as they clumsily leapt at her, she swung the Gluesword at one of their throats with supreme, telekinetic agility. She'd hoped to decapitate him like she did the Queen, but instead of chopping all the way through, the wide blade got stuck on his spine after going through his throat. Panicked, she slid it out sideways, and he crumpled to the ground, clutching at his cloven neck. Suddenly, she felt herself struggling to hold onto the Gluesword, and she realized that they were all singing against her, even if disunited and somewhat off-key, and she realized that despite all her abilities and advantages, she had no chance of beating fifty adult men anyway-

Energy flowed back into her, as Sheila sung the reversed Song of Paralysis in a clear, perfect tone.

"STRIKE BACK- IT'S TIME TO ATTACK!" Flapper screeched, and magic bullets flowed out in a wave, every Darkner began shooting their waves and bullets and blasts at him, magical fury-feathers spreading from Flapper in a whirlwind. _Don't, there's no way you can seriously hurt them with that_ , Michelle thought, and of course she was right, the bullets were leaving moderate flesh wounds at best, but they were interrupting and confusing and distracting the Chara army into attacking them, and a couple of them went after Flapper with the Song of Flight, but the bird was faster than they were and knew when to run.

And Michelle was in motion, her sword flickering and spinning, not killing with every strike but inflicting wounds to just keep them away from her- a Chara was right there in front of her sword and she squeezed the tip, sending airway-blocking glue right down his nose and mouth- another one grabbed her in the face and she burned the wrist with cartilage-melting temperatures, burning blood sugar for a few precious instants of life. A fist grazed the side of her head, not hard or direct enough to even concuss her, but the Chara who had thrown it screamed as Sheila rammed her trident deep into his back- a couple went after her, and she retreated into the Darkner melee- and then the inevitable happened, one of them had grabbed Michelle in a chokehold from behind, cutting off her oxygen, and she didn't have the energy to break his hold or melt his brain-

And then the hug was gone with a loud popping sound of eyeballs, ruptured eardrums, and boiling brain matter. The Charas turned from her to fight what was behind her, and in half an instant, one had his eye and brain popped by a laser beam, another one had a telekinetically thrown knife deep in his throat, and the last one turned just as Charles punched him in the face. The Chara's jaw snapped like a twig even as his teeth bit bloody gashes into Charles' gloved knuckles. Others recognized the threat and turned from the Darkner assault to sing against him- but Sheila was still singing as well and she was much better at it- Charles grabbed two of their heads and they slumped over dead just as his foot lashed out with a telekinetic kick that snapped the neck of another one (he was **so much bigger** than they were, seven feet to their six and a slab of muscle besides), and Michelle, recovering, realized that this was her father in his purest form.

Even without EXP, even with unknown magics threatening to cripple and kill him, even burning blood sugar like a furnace, Prince Charles Dreemurr would not be stopped.

But that was simple wishful thinking, a girl choosing to believe that her father really was unstoppable, and Michelle was not prone to such things. Instead, she leapt back and pulled the hooked trident from that Chara's back in a spurt of blood and torn muscle and another scream, and she flew through the air with energy she didn't know she had, aiming for a backfield Chara who had chosen to do nothing but sing, and as he looked up at her she forced the trident forward as hard as she could, aiming for his eye but instead ramming it all the way through the center of his nose. Magical bullets singed her hair and caught her in the back and she realized it was friendly fire from the Darkners, and as she looked in that direction, she did not like what she saw at all, and that vision of her and Sheila's toy-people being left in crumpled heaps of shattered plastic, ripped cloth, broken wood, and torn paper would surely be in her nightmares for years - assuming she lived that long. She was swinging the Gluesword, not consciously realizing what she was swinging it at until a Chara's shoulder was halfway severed. Flapper had rejoined the fray, using hit-and-run tactics against every Chara she saw, and Charles was moving at the exact same murderous speed he had started at, and Michelle realized in a rush that there was in fact something called **morale** and that, under sustained agonizing fire and the deaths of so many, the enemy's morale was starting to break- just as the reality alteration was elapsing, the distributed mind reforming, EXP once again becoming a law of reality.

It didn't matter. Charles' power was recovering in proportion to his own normal reserve, and he had so very much of it. He flew at the Charas whether they were running, fighting, or singing, moving faster and faster and spraying more and more gore with every blow. There- a skull simply gone. There- he'd cast a verbal spell from his own phone, his fingers nearly as fast as Michelle's, and a Chara was consumed in lava-hot flames. One of the Charas jumped from the roof and Charles went after him, curb-stomping him from five stories up. There was another scream and a Chara clawed at his bleeding eyes; Flapper had focused all of her projectile blades straight into his face. Sheila silently slammed her ultra-sharp belt knife directly into his lower jaw.

"You too, Sheila?" asked the last Chara before Charles flew at him, clapping his hands onto Chara's skull as hard as he could, and everyone there learned what would happen if someone dropped an anvil from a tall building onto a watermelon.

"Dad, I..." Michelle started, completely exhausted, splashed with blood, staggering towards him, dragging the Gluesword and leaving a cut onto the weird cardboard floor. (The Chara that had been burned was still burning, consuming some of the cardboard, and she thought detachedly that someone should probably do something about that.)

"Still not yet," Charles said, still talking very casually as if nothing at all had happened even though small chunks of crimson, wet, coppery-smelling meat were falling from him, and Michelle finally understood that he was doing that very, very deliberately. He went to put out the fire that Michelle was looking at. "He's still not technically dead." It was true. A voice was in Michelle's mind, screaming incomprehensibly, demanding that she kill herself, her father, her alternate, everyone. She was only LV 3 and her mind was largely incomprehensible to him, so Chara's helpless screaming was utterly ineffective. "This universe isn't right somehow, there's something else that needs to happen." And then Michelle realized. She walked up to Sirale, who was exactly where he had been when the melee started: curled into a paralyzed ball, completely ignored by all combatants.

"Sirale. Wake up." The little goat slowly uncurled himself, and only then did Charles realize just how much like little Azzy the goat really was. It struck him considerably harder than it had Michelle. "I know this is hard for you, but we're about to fulfill the prophecy. Remember the prophecy? Who were the three heroes?"

"Th-the-the Princess, the Songstress, and the Prince of Darkness," Sirale sputtered out. "But I'm n-not..."

" **You're** not," Michelle told him, as Sheila healed many of the surviving Darkners, whose number Michelle was unwilling to count. "Another name for the Prince of Darkness is Satan, the Devil. Which is what my **dad** calls himself." The moniker was very well-earned. "And **that** was the Angel from Heaven. He'd killed the last monster on his world a long time ago." She gestured to the strewn corpses in various conditions ranging from fully intact to the opposite. _There's another guaranteed nightmare right there_. She did not have the energy to process it. "How do we seal the fountains, Sirale?"

"I d-don't know..."

"By fountain, do you mean that?" Charles asked, pointing towards the black geyser, which had been blithely pumping unreality into the world, heedless of the nearby war.

"Yeah, that's it," Michelle replied.

"I get it," Charles said, nodding slightly. He'd become good at the weirdnesses and rituals of interuniversal travel, and the situation made intuitive sense to him in a way that would take Michelle six densely packed paragraphs of magical jargon to generally understand. "You have DETERMINATION here, so there's some stuff I'll need you to say. Sheila, please come here; there's some lines I'll need sung while I recite." She didn't hesitate.

"Hey, uh, Dad, should I de-level myself now?" Michelle asked, holding up her phone. The constant pleading and demands were not something she really needed right then, and despite the physical advantages, she really didn't want her father in her head for the rest of her life either.

"Go ahead," Charles said, but before she found the spell and pressed the button, he sent a burst of thoughts that drowned out Chara's screaming, a direct communication that would be with her for the rest of her life, far, far longer than any of the trauma or nightmares would. _I love you, Michelle, and I am very,_ _ **very**_ _proud of you._

 _I love you too, Dad._ She purged the EXP from her system and became a mostly normal human- by her universe's standards- once more.

The rest was simple mechanics. One ritual sealed open a permanent portal between the fountain and Sheila's room; another was done at Sirale's fountain to hook the 34(b) with Michelle's universe. There was another spell, less complicated but darker in purpose, and Chara's existence was ripped out of the world, out of the 34(b) and his home universe both, and Charles Highlandered yet another one, his power rising another small notch.

"I told you, you were already dead," Michelle said to empty air.

Sheila still wanted to see Sheila's home, and Sirale wasn't willing to be away from his Lightner for anything at that point, so Charles walked his daughter and her friends through the portal home.


	10. Unexpected Royalty

"Holy **shit**!" ten-year-old Mander yelled, looking up from his phone and briefly scrambling backwards on Michelle's bed. He was the only one in the room, Michelle noticed; apparently someone had thought to post him as a lookout in her room. Her clothes were in a pile on the floor right where she'd vanished right out of them, although they'd all come back in through a portal that had become a permanent fixture on her wall. Mander flew out of the room through the open door. "Mom! Everyone! Shelly's home and she's with Dad and some other people and they just came out of a **slaughterhouse**!" Michelle tittered briefly- her littlest brother's childish demeanor was refreshing- but she was interrupted by Sheila gasping slightly and stumbling, leaning on her trident for support. _Oh, right, the gravity._ She'd envisioned supporting Sheila with her own power, but she didn't have any of that left, and neither did Sheila. Charles understood the problem at once and Sheila started floating, gently dropping the trident. Michelle realized that she was still clutching the Gluesword in a death grip and willed her hands to open.

The entire Dreemurr family crowded into the hall in a rush ( _they all came home, they're all home because of me_ ), Gaster and the master mage Asmodeus hanging back along with Abe, a representative of the Department of Transdimensional Exploration. Sans was not there, which was just as well; if he'd been there to make a bad pun, Charles might have shattered him. The adults were shouting relief and some of the kids were shouting questions (while Sheila stared at Gaster, **an actual Gaster** back there and people treating him like he was normal) but Charles held up a hand. "Frisk," he said in a boosted tone, "get the ampoules. **All of them**." Michelle blinked. A single emotion-transference ampoule, which Frisk used as an aid in treating psychiatric patients, was to be used in the Dreemurr household only when absolutely necessary. Surely, Mom wouldn't- but Frisk did not even take a second look at her before immediately flying to do just that. _We must look like absolute hell_. "Mom, food. You know which kind." Toriel did not hesitate either. "Bath time for you three. Az." Charles effortlessly put Sheila into Asriel's white, fluffy arms as he immediately stepped forward, and Michelle caught his startled look on seeing Sirale. "Everyone else, we'll talk again in an hour. There's stuff I need to clean up." _In multiple senses of the word._ "Don't follow me, and do **not** mess with their artifacts." Right, she still had the Glowshard in her pocket, the token, even their clothes were artifacts of the 34(b). And like that, Charles was gone, back through the portal.

"Are you injured anywhere?" Asriel asked as he led them to the spacious hot tub, running the water at just the right temperature, the powerful, wide nozzle filling it quickly.

"No, there's healing," Michelle said, knowing that that fact was of world-shattering importance, particularly to Asriel, but not able to marshal her thoughts enough to explain why and instead just letting him help her out of her clothes. The dress wasn't nearly so sticky when she got it. "Wait, is my back all right?" She remember getting hit by Darkner bullets at one point but could not for the life of her remember if or when it was healed.

"I took care of that," Sheila dully rasped. Michelle vaguely worried about her not wanting to be undressed by Asriel, but she didn't seem to care at all, and Asriel slipped off Sirale's robe without even a bleat of protest from the little goat. Michelle stepped into the tub just as Asriel lowered Sheila into it next to her, and it turned a light shade of crimson even before Asriel brought out the powerful disinfectant soap.

"I need to know what kind of healing this is," Asriel said gently, washing Michelle's hair, which she'd just noticed needed a lot more washing than usual, trying not to pay too much attention to the color of the water. "Is it regenerative, wound sealing, Platonic ideal?" His voice raised slightly on that last one.

Michelle didn't know how Asriel would define it. "They don't have aging, sickness, or cancer where she's from, and their technology is from the Dark Ages," Michelle said.

Asriel looked deep into the humans with his chirurgical sense as he washed them, feeling their inner workings at the cellular level, noticing the absence of the natural, tiny imperfections that he'd noticed years ago but couldn't have removed from Michelle's body. Whatever was powering the magic healing was obviously a much smarter process than the fundamentally basic-physics 'console commands' that were the spells of his world. "Well, there goes my job," he said casually, choosing to focus on the three kids in front of him rather than worrying about long-term concerns, and abruptly Michelle began to laugh spasmodically, Sheila quickly following suit.

"Why is this funny?!" Michelle and Sheila asked at the exact same time, and that made them laugh harder, Sirale completely confused and still silent.

"Endorphin rush," Asriel replied. "Enjoy it while it lasts." He turned to Sirale. "I don't know if you know this, but you're like me, so **you** don't get it." Sirale vaguely nodded and Asriel's brow furrowed in worry.

"Ampoules," Frisk called, opening the bathroom door, getting a good look at Michelle and her friends, recognizing the parallels. "Is everyone all right?"

"The girls are fine for now," Asriel said, picking an ampoule out of Frisk's box. "It's my counterpart who needs help. What's your name?" he asked the little goat.

"Sirale," he said, and Michelle felt a sharp pang of guilt, remembering how happy and exuberant he'd first been, before he knew what heroism could **really** involve.

"Sirale... Oh, of course. Right." Michelle was mildly pleased with herself for figuring it out faster than he had. "Sirale, I want you to focus on all your bad emotions, all your fear and tragedy, can you do that for me?" Sirale nodded and Asriel gently reached into the water and touched the ampoule to the little goat's midsection, rather than the head where he would have touched a human. It filled with black, tarry gunk immediately and Asriel set it aside, his eyes wide- he was surprised the little goat hadn't started melting a while ago. "Okay, we're going to do a little bit more." He took three more ampoules, which would be overkill for most humans and an insane amount for a monster, leaching out all the horror and disillusionment that risked corrupting or damaging Sirale's pattern. "Feeling better?"

"Yeah, a lot better!" Sirale chirped. "But that was..."

"Whatever happened, don't think about it right now," Frisk advised, gently kneeling down to the tub and petting the little goat's wet, floppy ears, the way she still did with her own goat brother, and Sirale bleated softly. "Just relax. All of you. We'll have lots and lots of time to worry about everything later, or whenever you want. Never's fine too." It was her husband that she was going to interrogate. There were, after all, no coincidences in interuniversal travel.

"Later," Michelle agreed. She felt like her brain was going to fall apart.

"Children, your snacks are here," Toriel said, walking in with a bright grandmotherly smile despite her actual feelings. She'd brought in doubly rich chocolate fudge with hints of butterscotch and cinnamon, a nutritionist's nightmare of sugar and fat, the sort of thing Charles ate to recharge his own power. She fed all three of them directly, as much as they wanted, which wasn't much; the idea of wanting to eat didn't quite cross Michelle's mind, Sheila had never eaten anything so rich in her life, and Sirale was still just a monster. Even as she fed them, Toriel wasn't quite able to conceal her horror at what they had gone through. _It wasn't that bad for us, Grandma, and we were there_ , Michelle thought, but then realized that maybe it had been that bad. She couldn't tell.

But Toriel didn't know the story and was probably worried about all sorts of things that didn't happen, so Michelle decided to ease her burden in as few words as possible. "We killed a really evil monster, and then we met a universe creator who'd been influenced by a Gaster and we got a reality hack and we used that to kill a Chara in a bunch of bodies," she explained.

"And they're really good at dealing with consequences!" Sirale piped up, and Sheila started laughing to herself.

"That runs in the family," Toriel replied without missing a beat. "Are you named Shelly as well?" she asked Michelle's counterpart.

"Sheila," she rasped, and Toriel simply nodded. Michelle wondered if someone was going to have to explain the way Sheila talked, but that didn't happen; her mother simply stroked her fluffy hand over Sheila's wet hair instead as if she were the other girl's grandmother as well. Sheila smiled at Michelle, saying everything in a moment's glance: _Thank you so much for bringing me here._ Michelle smiled back and closed her eyes; before she knew it, she drifted off to sleep.

She did not dream.

She woke to a soft, fluffy hand gently pressing on her shoulder. Opening her eyes, she laughed a bit; Sirale was floating in the tub, sleeping face-up. Sheila was half-dozing and glanced in her direction. Her skin had gotten a bit wrinkly. "How long...?"

"About an hour. Dinner's ready," Asriel replied. Dr. Asriel Dreemurr would never let anyone fall asleep in a tub of water without supervision, and she realized that he would have, without question or complaint, watched over them all night. He'd even slowly cycled the water. "How are you feeling?"

"Like I can think again," Michelle answered, lifting herself out of the tub, adding a bit of lift to Sheila to make the gravity easier on her. The ampoules were still in the room, mostly unused; Michelle still wasn't in the mood to freak out about anything and neither was Sheila. The walk-in hair dryer- a favorite of the goats- was adjacent, and the three of them luxuriated, taking seats in the middle of the hot, blowing air. An old but well-maintained robe of Asriel's was sitting nearby, the right size for Sirale, and two identical sets of Michelle's purple Dreemurr-fur pajamas were in neatly folded piles.

"What kind of spell is **this**?" Sheila whispered, and Michelle couldn't stifle her giggle.

"It's technology, works everywhere. Just assume that everything we do is technology, except when it's magic," Michelle replied, lifting a Dreemurr hairbrush and proceeding to brush the little goat. He was very much like his counterpart in the shedding department, and soft, black Dreemurr-equivalent fur rapidly covered the brush. "Oh, yeah. Hey, Az, make sure she gets a dose of the magic gene," she said conversationally even though Asriel was in the other room, but of course he heard her and cracked the door to tell them it was already on its way. "Also, Sheila, try singing something, make sure the rules here didn't change." She was fully aware of what she was asking: _Please test to see if the laws of metaphysics in this entire universe are the same as they used to be._

Sheila sang something that Michelle didn't recognize, and the acoustics of the room echoed in strange ways, and everyone in the whole house (even the ones without superhuman hearing) must have heard the clear, full tone. She shook her head; it was totally ineffective. "It's worse for you in my world," Sheila said in her musical accent, remembering Michelle's awkward movements.

"Yeah, but this gravity's worse for you," Michelle replied, stopping with Sirale's fur and starting on her own hair, Sheila following suit. "It's all right, with our magic it shouldn't be too bad. I'll teach you how to use it."

"You'd have me stay here forever?" Sheila asked, a bit confused.

"Do you **want** to go back?" Michelle replied, more confused. "I mean, if you really can't handle the gravity or maybe our sun's too bright or something," Michelle continued, considering Sheila's half-translucent skin, "then we could probably set something up to make travel quick, but that place'll have to be fortified because there's no DETERMINATION there and there's a massive power vacuum." Sheila shook her head, signifying a lack of understanding. "Chara's not King anymore, so who's in charge?" Sheila nodded and Michelle heard faint, deep chuckling, and then Michelle realized how she was being silly as the fog continued to lift. "Actually, we need to protect your world's side of the portal anyway, because there's a tunnel **straight to my room**." Michelle would have been very surprised if there weren't already well-paid, top-tier soldiers there doing just that. Military forces didn't generally like taking direct orders from the Devil, so Dad had started his own PMC.

"But, no matter where I lived, you would have me protected."

"Do you now understand what the word 'princess' means?" Michelle asked, putting on the soft pajamas along with her alternate. She heard more chuckling and wondered what Asriel found so funny.

"I think I do," Sheila replied, opening the door.

"I wish I could be half the royalty you are," Sirale said wistfully as Michelle pocketed her phone, and both of the girls were glad that he did not blame them for the violence that they had done.

Downstairs, the rest of the Dreemurr family waited, an uncommon sight. Despite Toriel's general wish to have family dinners, the conflicting schedules and occasional unforeseen obligations associated with being Dreemurr royalty meant that all eleven of them were present for dinner a couple of times a month; Charles was, by far, the most likely to be absent. This evening's meal was a feast of buttered potatoes, garden vegetables, cheese, and an actual pig with an apple in its mouth sitting in the center, right out of a movie or a cartoon. There were a total of thirteen seats, nine of them filled with Asriel halfway down the stairs, and Michelle realized that her family was, in fact, waiting for the three of them, a position that she was absolutely not familiar with and certainly not in favor of (and one that Mander was obviously in disfavor of as well). Sheila had seen feasts like this before- she must have, living with a Chara- but the idea that she was going to participate in one clearly struck her, and that combined with the still-unfamiliar gravity nearly caused her to tumble down the stairs before Michelle stabilized her alternate.

Her family sat silent and expectant as she arrived; it was unnerving, but she realized that this, too, was for her benefit; if somebody started talking, everybody would start talking, and someone (probably Grandma) had decided 'food first, talk later', and Charles had answered all of the important questions anyway. Sirale hopped up on his chair between the girls, while Michelle wasted no time in sitting down and Sheila pulled herself up with Charles' gentle telekinetic help, not sure what the family's rituals were or if anyone was going to say anything or if she had to use her utensils in a specific way. That was a bad thing to do to her, Michelle noted- you didn't give someone whose business was mimicry no idea what she was supposed to be mimicking. She'd soon discover that without their magic powers, she **couldn't** eat the way rambunctious Dreemurr children ate.

Often, when they were all at the table together, Charles would use his powers in a rhythmic, orderly way, making conductor-like gestures while reality-slashing through portions of food and sending it to his family's plates. Tonight, he had very little regard for such ceremony; he simply glanced at the food, first neatly slashing apart the pig into well-cooked pork cutlets, then moving foods around the table as efficiently and rapidly as he could focus on them, serving Michelle and her friends first. Michelle'd regained her appetite after that hour in the tub; she was really, fiercely hungry as the various magics had depleted various chemical reserves, and porcine protein went down her throat almost as soon as it hit her table. She glanced over at Sheila and Sirale, pointing with a very simple message: _If Dad hadn't intended for us to start chowing down, he wouldn't have put this on our plates right away._ They got the message very quickly.

Food tastes different when you're actually, really hungry; this Michelle knew from having burned through her reserves many times before, in the service of a performance or just seeing what she could do. Most magic-wielding kids went through it in the formative years of their lives, running themselves to exhaustion, discovering their bodies' limits. Michelle had the tendency to probe at them, test them, see what she could do- a tendency that had ultimately served her very well an hour ago. Whenever she ate lame store candy to compensate, it tasted wonderful; Grandma's and Gary's home cooking was beyond divine, and she was annoyed that she'd earlier had sweets without being able to taste them properly.

"Are you doing okay?" Frisk asked after a more or less continuous stream of food-down-throat. Michelle knew which kind of okay she meant.

"I'm fine, I just don't feel like thinking about it right now," Michelle replied, and her mother smiled and nodded in reply. The idea that she and her father had mutilated a bunch of Charas to death while innocent Darkners had been slaughtered was there, still in her memory, but the truth was that she was kind of procrastinating on emotionally reacting to it, and her mother had explicitly told her that never getting around to that was fine. She wondered whether that was an ability that other people, even her own family, had, and figured that she really didn't want to deal with that right then either. Sheila, the mental shapeshifter, simply nodded, obviously being of a similar mindset.

"You two should expect calls tomorrow," Charles said. Teaching Sheila how to use a phone was on the immediate to-do list. "Who you let in there is up to you, but it's research." Michelle stopped chewing for a second as she realized what had happened: Abe from the DTE (probably along with Gaster and Asmodeus) had asked to send teams in to gauge just what sort of universes had become connected to this one, and Charles had told him that he'd need her or Sheila's permission- or preferably both- before the US government began poking around in the girls' 34(b). (Michelle realized, in a storm of insight, that arguing would not have crossed Abe's mind, as a matter of national policy and common sense - and that she and her alternate **owned a private universe**.) Charles' voice was methodical and regular, as he intended to absolutely be understood. "Sheila, after committing regime change in other universes, our society's policy is, whenever possible, to place our favorite members of that universe's society in positions of power, in general accordance with its existing traditions of governance as far as that's sensible." Charles had shredded enough ruling Charas- in the worlds where the Chara didn't simply kill everyone- that this was familiar to him. Michelle's eyes widened, and she looked to the rest of her family, who had all either known or, like her, had just figured it out. She'd have imagined that Chara's former heaven would be colonized outright, given that it had healing magic and a lot of other things, but Earth's marginally united forces were spread thin as it was. Putting locals in charge with a minimum of interference was clearly the least-bad option.

The society's existing traditions of governance were total autocracy. And the **favorite** members of that society? There was only one of those.

Her Majesty, Queen Sheila Dreemurr, looked around the table, thrust into a role she really had no idea how to play. "Do not be alarmed, my child," Toriel patiently said. "You will by no means be left to rule without aid." Sheila kept right on looking around the table, weirding out Michelle's siblings, trying to work out why everyone was being so **nice** to her.

The first, of course, was that Sheila was an alternate version of Michelle. The second was that both the Dreemurrs and the American government were almost certainly better off this way (greater freedom of action, less risk of political backlash), and the difference between 'puppet government' and 'stalwart ally' was very much fluid. Grandpa had talked enough politics for Michelle to know that, and Sheila would probably learn realpolitik just as quickly as she learned magic. But the third, the all-critical third, was that Dreemurrs helped people when it was appropriate to help people because that was what they did. The back-of-the-envelope calculation was 50 people to dream up one regular, non-boss monster and five hundred of those monsters to make a full-powered Chara, so with fifty-odd Charas, that was somewhere around 1.25 million people in Chara's Heaven (they would have to think up a new name, and soon) who could very much benefit from a stable governance structure that forbade people from coming to take advantage of them.

"I'm sure you'll do a wonderful job!" Sirale chirped, and **that** was when the dam finally broke - Mander could no longer contain his curiosity, and the other Dreemurr kids tag-teamed a storm of questions, all about the adventure part and none about the misadventure part (Charles had headed **those** questions off by **telling them** ) and a heck of a lot of questions about who and what Darkners were, particularly Sirale, and then all five of them, even the notably patient Nomie, had wanted to go in and explore. Michelle smiled, the sort of tolerant smile she'd learned from the adults in her family, realizing that she had her own duty to fulfill. A Dreemurr princess was, after all, expected to share.

She just wondered if she'd have time to finish her biology homework.


	11. Joy and Sorrow

Michelle was unsurprised to see the wires leading through her portal and totally unsurprised that she actually got quite a view looking through it; the only thing she found surprising was that the breeze blowing through it was so gentle. ( _Huh. Similar air pressure._ ) She'd need to get some kind of door installed, probably on the other side; she and Sheila were changing out of their pajamas into more conventional clothes, and Michelle picked out matching dark purple dresses because it was a royal color suitable for the new Queen and because it seemed appropriate for a Darkner funeral. It was her usual color of choice anyway; her SOUL (and presumably Sheila's as well) was simply purple, or possibly spectral violet, depending on which monster she asked. (Asriel had said that it was perceptual, not a physical hue, so there really was no difference.)

Before long, she knew, there would be a modulator hooked up to the portal in order to alleviate energy imbalance concerns, fueled by the fusion reactor that they'd built under Mt. Ebbot when she was six, and Sheila's side would have one as well. Her dad had given her a physical book on this stuff years ago; another unsurprising thing, as he'd helped Gaster write it. (Michelle was glad that most of her books didn't seem to show up as Darkners. The idea of a book on interuniversal travel forming its own Darkner was disturbing to contemplate.)

But the Darkners that **were** created... she couldn't continue procrastinating on caring about their deaths, not when she was thinking about her siblings not being able to meet them, and with that thought, she opened her door to let her family in. She didn't start crying, not really, but as she put her shoes on (and helped Sheila with a similar pair), her nose started getting a bit runny and she swallowed the snot. "It's the Darkners," she explained before anyone could ask. "There were some of them that you would really have liked, but a lot of them died, and... I don't know which ones." She'd intentionally avoided knowing, because it wasn't information that she could have put to any good use at the time. Arial, her older sister, put a loving arm around her. Her mother offered her an ampoule, something that would suck out not the brain chemicals of grief but the actual qualia themselves, but Michelle waved it away. "They died **protecting us**. I need to feel this." She realized that she was looking for ways to blame herself, mentally going back and thinking of things she could have done differently. She stopped herself, hard. She did what she could with the knowledge she had at the time.

"Dad told us," James added. _Thanks, Dad._ It was good not to have to explain these things in detail.

"Should we restore them before everyone else goes in?" Sheila asked musically and innocently. _Obviously not_ , Michelle thought; that was before they'd sealed the portals open. She just wished Sheila had a basis for understanding the simple analogy: you didn't LOAD a game state from before you'd patched the game, not unless you wanted Really Bad Things to happen.

"Sorry, but you don't have that power anymore," Charles replied to Michelle's surprise. "The three universes are now on a single-DETERMINATION basis." Sheila seemed to take that stoically, but something about the way he said it clued Michelle in: it didn't technically have to be that way. She vaguely recalled the lines her father had told her to recite while thinking about her own power; she was very, very good at magic but had never cast anything like that before, and in her after-battle fugue (shell shock?), she'd simply done as he asked. "On the bright side, both of you are native rememberers now." They would remember every timeline, no matter what.

"You didn't even warn us, Dad," Michelle told him, and he simply nodded, even as some of her siblings also glared at him. James in particular looked like he was waiting for her to start yelling at him so he could back her up. Charles stood there and took it; he never, ever got truly angry with his family, not even when they were furious at him.

Still, none of them (even her youngest siblings) could logically see his decision as anything but the right choice; doing SAVEs and LOADs between universes was already a dicey proposition even with 21st century telecommunications to warn people, and she felt a moderate sense of relief that she wouldn't have to worry about where everyone and everything was. The risk of duplication or erasure would have been a constant, serious threat. It was probably better that he hadn't brought it up at the time; she really wasn't in the best place for thinking about this stuff when the spells were cast. _Dad was right again._ That was the thing with her father: he might do things that his family might not like, but he wouldn't - and she had the sneaking, unprovable suspicion that he **couldn't** \- ultimately do anything that wasn't in their best interest.

The understanding must have been clear on her face, as he smiled and gestured to his wife. "This also means that your mother can go there as well." No one could guarantee what would happen if Frisk and her associated DETERMINATION left her home universe, so she generally stayed away from interdimensional portals. (Confined to a volume of space a mere 91 billion light-years across, she'd joked.) If where she was going shared the same DETERMINATION rules, this stopped being a concern. Of course Frisk had SAVEd once everyone had ample warning that she was going to do that, and she didn't plan on ever LOADing to an emergency shared-SOUL SAVE from before that, either, due to the risk of Really Bad Things.

Michelle's siblings ran through the portal first, Mander leading the way, his twin sister close behind, gazing at the weird town below and at the Darkners re-opening the shops ( _no, they were never open to begin with_ ) and at the way everything, including themselves, glowed. "I'll show you around!" Sirale chirped, following shortly after.

"Wait just a bit," Asriel said as he ducked his tall frame through the portal, the rest of his family close behind. " **This** takes me back," he said as he looked around, just a little trepidation creeping into his voice. "It's worse, actually."

"Azzy, you don't have to," Frisk said beside him, knowing exactly what he meant.

"I'm all right." He kneeled down next to Sirale, still being considerably taller than the little goat even so. "You were made for this place," Asriel told him. "This place was made for you, and you were made for a very special human. Try to keep up with her." Michelle couldn't imagine the emotions that were going through either of them; it was very possible that they didn't even have human counterparts. Michelle saw Grandpa and Grandpa nodding, and she tried to ponder what it would mean to be made for someone, to have someone else's existence be the reason you drew breath. The closest analogy she could think of was servitude, or slavery; but that was wrong too, particularly as Sirale wasn't human or even a monster. Her grandfather had often reminded her and all her siblings: Even human-level monsters are not human beings and may not always act in quite the same ways. She wondered just how different Sirale really was.

"Sheila, please sing Healing for everyone you haven't," Asriel requested. "It won't take much energy." Some of the kids giggled, as he was obviously vaunting his own skills; his chirurgic abilities wouldn't leave the (presumably absolute) healing magic with much to do. Michelle was going to mention how she had already saved it to her phone, but Sheila was already singing, her incredible performance astounding Michelle's family; none of them had ever met anyone who could sing that well, and not even talented Arial came close. "If you want to be able to use our magic or spend any time on Earth, you and I are going to have a long talk about medicine," Asriel gently informed Sheila when everyone was done clapping. Sheila didn't really understand what he meant, but Michelle did. The healing was so comprehensive that no one in Sheila's universe had immunity to any of Earth's germs, and if she relied on returning to somewhere that she could sing to avoid infection, the magic gene's vector wouldn't have time to make it truly part of her and therefore something to heal towards rather than away from.

Most of the group was surprised to see the particularly large bird swoop in and land next to them, her wings whipping the Dreemurrs' fur and hair around. "It's a pleasure to hear your melodious voice," Flapper said.

"Flapper, I'm **so sorry** we couldn't-" Michelle started, but Flapper waved off her concerns with a wing.

"We've freedom and safety; it's time to rejoice."

Rejoice they did, and Michelle stopped being able to keep track of everybody. Her siblings- and even her mother- took the opportunity to explore and curiously investigate everything. Frisk was poking around the town and being friendly to the ( _surviving_ ) Darkners, recognizing the similarities and acknowledging the differences; monsters had been happy to be free of the Underground but Darkners were just fine where they were. Arial and James were inspecting the structure of the place, as she'd initially done. Gary and Sheila were talking in somewhat hushed tones, asking Flapper something, and she rhymed agreement and took the two onto her back to fly to parts unknown. Nomie and Mander had gone off together- or rather, Mander had hared off somewhere and Nomie had patiently followed him, a not-uncommon experience for the twins. Asriel and Sirale were very quietly talking about ethical or philosophical that she only halfway made out. Asgore and Toriel were simply there, watching their children and grandchildren. Michelle sighed. Her family was getting to relax and enjoy themselves, which is what **she'd** wanted to do when she came here. But she had something she needed to do, and she slowly walked along the route she had gone before, totally alone, even as her family played in her playground. She just wished she could float there instead of needing to walk. _Note to self: Get some fast-travel system installed between the portals._

"Want a piggyback ride?" her father asked from behind her.

"Yes, please," Michelle immediately answered. There was zero sense in trying to act like she was too old for it. She backflipped blindly and he caught her on his shoulders; she'd first done that when she was six. Almost as if he were reading her mind, he casually floated along as she'd wanted to, a profligate waste of power for an ordinary human but negligible for him.

"This is the first time you've experienced unrecoverable loss," he told her matter-of-factly, slowly drifting over the purple grass in the gentle breeze. It was true. As a Dreemurr, she had never permanently lost anything but the trivial. The Dreemurr protective umbra was extensive, even beyond the global rememberer system; none of her friends from school had ever experienced serious harm, nor would they, and nobody ever stopped being Michelle's friend, because **Dreemurr**. Even her computer and phone did regular, highly secure backups. The only losses she'd taken before this involved not always scoring first place in everything. "Do you know how to deal with it?"

"Stoically," she answered. "The Serenity Prayer." Her mother was Frisk and she was a rememberer; very few things in her life fell into the category of 'things that cannot be changed'. More than once, her family had warned her and her siblings that they might one day run into something that was permanent, beyond the reach of DETERMINATION. She'd believed him but hadn't wanted to.

"Yes," he said. "When Chara had me under his power, I was going to tell you to LOAD before I realized you had a better option." He said it with a forced lack of emotion.

"And kill you, or something close to it," Michelle woodenly replied.

"Yes. It would have been fine. Michelle, if I unrecoverably lost you, or your mother, or uncle, or even a single one of your brothers or sisters, or even one of our parents, what would I do?"

There were two answers. One was the Stoic answer; that he would simply accept it and move on because he had no other choice. But that was not the right answer, not for what he really was, not for the deadly thing she'd had inside her mind.

"Go berserk. Kill everyone," Michelle said. "Destroy everything. End all the worlds." There was one special power of his, one that only his fellow Charas were immune to, a magic symbol that only a Chara could use. He could slash spacetime itself, and he'd even let physicists closely observe him doing exactly that. As he extinguished more and more evil Charas (once in a great while, he met one who was not, and the two exchanged some information and parted peacefully), his range and power slowly grew, and he'd never met a Chara who was smarter and more capable than himself; even if they had more total power, he was usually far more dangerous. The only question was whether he'd find something out there to end existence before something in existence ended him. She realized that she was probably the first person he had ever admitted that to.

"I love you all so very much," Charles replied, and she heard the tears in his voice. "Hey, you two!" he called out to Nomie and Mander a moment later in a completely different voice, floating up to them with Michelle still on his back and a smile on his face as if absolutely nothing had happened. They were just leaving the Cashy Shop, both of them with half-eaten Darkburgers in hand ( _even Nomie?!_ ), Mander with a yellow-bladed marker sword in his other hand and Nomie carrying around the protractor shield. "Got some loot?"

"She takes dollars!" Mander replied around a mouthful of Darkburger, which- from his breath- smelled exactly like regular hamburger. They'd just eaten Mom's food not even fifteen minutes ago, but rambunctious kids with magic powers tended to burn energy **fast** , and they ran off in low-gravity, magically enhanced strides as if attempting to prove that very thing. Nomie's virtue was patience, and she needed so very much of it to put up with her twin.

"Next time, I'm getting a burger," Charles said diffidently. He'd have it sent in for analysis, to see if any DNA could be recovered- assuming it had any- and if it was actually made of an Earth animal.

"We are out of stock," Cashy burbled as Michelle hopped off her father's back, its tentacles waving. Wasn't there candy here, too? The twins had probably pocketed it. "Absolutely nothing is for sale, for the low price of absolutely nothing! Has the sword treated you well?"

"Yes," Michelle replied. "I don't think we'd be here without it." _Any of us._ "Hey, Cashy, where'd you get your stock in the first place?" The cash register was utterly silent, unable to confront its own lack of knowledge. _Out of bounds error._ Suddenly, it all seemed very sad, not for the dead Darkners but for the living ones. What if she had been a normal girl and not Michelle Dreemurr, a normal girl who wanted to keep this place a secret? They'd live out their meaningless toy existences in this 34(b), forever waiting for their Lightner to return and play with them again. "It's fine, I wasn't expecting you to know. Hey, how'd you like to run a Lightner shop? I'm sure we could find something for you."

"You would let me do that? A Darkner, among Lightners?"

 _Purpose-built AIs_ , Michelle reminded herself. It was chilling to behold. "Of course, Cashy. I'm not a tyrant that wants to keep you or anyone here, and the world's full of monsters. Nobody's going to think you're weird." Humanity's overall tolerance for weirdness had grown substantially in the past couple of decades. "Do you need help getting out?"

"I am too heavy and solid for you to move," Cashy burbled, and Michelle openly laughed.

Charles scoffed. "Are you bolted to the ground?"

"No, I", Cashy started, and Charles picked up her large, solid metal form from ten feet away. "What's your energy source?"

"The fountains can recharge my batteries," Cashy nervously explained, its tentacles waving in surprise.

"If they're actual batteries, we can do better than that," Charles replied, effortlessly bringing the large machine to him and popping open its rear battery compartment. "Yeah, these feel like standard lithium," he said, snapping it back closed. "We can handle this. Is there anybody else here who can't move by itself?"

"Just Cashy, as far as I know," Michelle said. Charles nodded and called somebody, who picked up on the first ring. Brief words were exchanged. "There's a whole planet- if you can call it that- that needs to be able to buy things," Charles explained after hanging up. "Their whole world's going to be full of monsters soon, we ought to get them used to it." He turned to the cash register, setting it gently on the ground. "There's a team coming for you," he explained to the thankful, waving cash register as Michelle hopped onto his back again.

"'If you can call it that?'" Michelle asked as they floated away.

"Yeah, it doesn't orbit a star. The container's only about ten miles above the surface. Anentropic." He tapped the universe-wall. "There's a moving light source on it, three axes of rotation. No deserts there, no poles, no tides, and from what I understand, no oceans. Just hills and lakes." It sounded like a constructed idyll, but that would make it... "Guess what type we think it is?"

"Seven," Michelle answered immediately. Type 6 was a theoretical hell-universe, type 7 was a theoretical heaven. Neither had been actually encountered before. She laughed to herself. "Sheila's the queen of an actual Type 7."

"You got it," Charles replied, continuing past where Sheila had tried to muster all those Darkners. It felt like a lifetime ago. _She's going to have her own real army now, or some kind of force. I hope Dad knew what he was doing with that._ But he always did, and Sheila was, after all, her alternate.

There was an open door in front of them, and Michelle noted the grooves in the ground as well as the four large blocks that were intended to be pushed. "They solved the puzzle!" Michelle exclaimed in surprise, running her hands through her hair. She was supposed to have done that!

"Mander and Nomie?" Charles asked.

"Yes! I said that **I** was going to..." She sighed. It was trivial, and yet... "I never told **them** , forget it, just keep going." Silently, Charles did.

The forest was nice, comfortable, and calm, the breeze gently blowing around the orange, glowing leaves. She spied an open treasure chest and realized that she actually didn't care very much who had opened it or what had been inside. The echo of chimes blew on the wind; the musical puzzle had been solved already, of course, and Michelle wondered which of the twins had stabilized the chimes against the breeze to prevent the wrong answer from coming up; or, possibly, if the constant random generation had eventually come up with the right answer and opened the door.

Michelle's heart fell as she approached the castle. "Dad... what did you do with the dead Darkners?" She almost wanted to use a word like 'slain' or 'fallen', but couldn't. They were dead. Simply dead.

"Temporarily encrypted them," Charles replied, and Michelle needed a brief moment to realize that he didn't mean computers. Charles had taken their bodies- even the Queen's- to one of the larger rooms on the first floor, and as he opened the door, they were greeted by a lot of dead Darkners but one sorrowful living one who knew that she'd come there.

"Auzen! You're alive!"

"Yes," the seemingly old man replied. "I owe you an apology. I was not in the battle, when so many of us were." Michelle didn't fault him for it, doubting that he had any serious attacks up his sleeve.

"It's okay, I owe you an apology, too. I couldn't do your puzzles. My siblings got to them first." She tried not to say 'siblings' like 'burdens' or 'problems', as they all loved each other very much and were all very close, but it came out that way anyway.

Auzen's eyes physically twinkled. "I don't think we can fault them for that, can we? Besides, I'm not going to remember this. You can do the puzzles next time."

"You know," Charles replied.

"Of course I know. Knowing is all I am. It was the only sane way to do it. And I know what you truly are, as well, just as she does now. Tell me, devil: what sorts of monsters do **you** dream up?"

Charles actually thought about the question. It wasn't reasonable to assume that he was like an ordinary human, only capable of dreaming up a fraction of a monster by himself. "I don't know," he finally said. "I haven't met one from myself."

Michelle finally decided to look at the carnage. Tex's electronics had been broken. The dancers, all of them, were shredded to bits, and Michelle felt a weird sort of relief that there weren't a few survivors forever regretting the loss of their companions with their limited minds. There was a clock that Michelle hadn't even met, and face and pendulum were cracked apart. _Animal equivalents_ , she tried to convince herself. _Like low-grade monsters, only they leave corpses. Subhuman, purpose-built intelligences, created at the whim of a mind-reading entity. The roughly human-equivalent ones, at least the ones I knew, all lived._ It didn't really work. They **weren't** part of her, they actually weren't, she didn't lose a part of herself here- but no matter how she tried to rationalize it away, she could not escape the impression that her innocence had been destroyed along with them.

Her phone beeped at her (Charles' did as well, and she imagined that the rest of her family had also received the message), and she picked it up. Gary had taken a selfie; he and Sheila were on Flapper's back, soaring high above the ground, out of reach of anything that might hurt them. She noticed the strangely darker sky, the joy in their faces, the wind whipping their hair, the glimpse of green pasture far below, the message Gary had sent and so giving the world a name: "Greetings from Cantopia!"

Most of all, she noticed the way that Sheila was holding onto her brother.


	12. Winning the Peace

Gaster and Gaster met in an interstice, a not-place between worlds, somewhere that didn't even have a number according to the classification system. There were very few rules here (unfortunately, "you can't create mass/energy or independent spacetime" was one of them) and little of importance to do - unless you were a Gaster or something like him, communicating with your alternate through carefully prescribed mutual agreement that prevented words from being used as actual weapons.

"You erred in getting Charles' daughter involved," Gaster told his counterpart. "He will kill you for that."

"The girl was a necessary instrument, not my goal," the other Gaster replied dismissively. "I did not anticipate the chain of events, but I found the end state acceptable. Your Chara is very good at removing his counterparts, and I am pleased that I was able to find one like him after so long searching. I needed him to settle things after Chara betrayed me." Gaster looked at his counterpart in silent questioning. "With my assistance, the influencable creator entity created that Heaven of his. I had intended to cooperate with him for my own research before he banished us, as the entity responds poorly to my thoughtforms, but he defected on our arrangement. I lament the time it took to find a destroyer-Chara, devise a method to summon him, and have him win his battle, and I lament losing access to the creator entity, but I feel that the end result was worth my expenditures. Defectors must be punished, after all."

"Your end result was not worth your expenditures, as you still got Charles' daughter involved," Gaster reiterated. "You failed to consider my own terms of cooperation with him, and I failed to convey the immediacy of my statement. He will kill you for that **now**." There was something else in that un-space with the two Gasters, something very powerful, very dark, and very, **very** angry. The other Gaster immediately constructed a metamaze of deadly traps around himself, a series of impossibly convoluted N-dimensional waves of Bad Time to kill anything approaching him, full of undefining erasers, memetic attacks, infohazards, and things for which even the most imaginative Earthlings had no concepts. It was utterly, completely futile. Charles slashed through it on every level that things could possibly be slashed and other ways that would have been impossible everywhere else.

"Knight! I require your aid!" the other Gaster screamed before the last vestiges of him were torn to pieces and merged with the nothingness around them, their information destroyed.

"Who or what is Knight?" Charles asked Gaster, the only one remaining.

"I don't know," Gaster replied, simply and honestly. "But I assume it is your next target." He resolved to be extra polite when asking Michelle's and Sheila's permission to study that 34(b) of theirs.

* * *

The door had been installed on the other side of the portal, Gaster's studies completed. The high adept songstress dress sat on a wooden hanger, ready to be worn. (Michelle resolved to wear it more in the near future, while she still could. She was still growing, after all.) The Gluesword sat on wall hooks, ready to be pulled down at a moment's notice. (A major adhesive company had analyzed the glue, recognizing it as a variant of one of their products, and she told them to refill it. Instead of charging her for it, they publicly announced what they'd done. Several major retailers ran out of their products within hours.) The Glowshard had turned out to be radioactive after all, but not a particularly dangerous kind; it was full of perfectly ordinary tritium, and it sat on her end table, merrily glowing away as a nightlight.

There was another nightlight as well. Sheila laid down next to her on the large bed, pointing to the ceiling, experimenting with different colors of light. She started at a violet, then went down through blue and green, yellow, orange, and red, and then past red. She could emit light she couldn't see? Furrowing her brow, she went back up the spectrum, going past violet this time.

"Don't mess with ultraviolet or anything past that too much, you can seriously hurt somebody," Michelle warned. "And don't mess too much with really way-down infrared frequencies either, you can interfere with phones and network stuff."

"That's the same as light?"

"Yep! And for something even weirder, check this out. If I say that I want two identical, coherent sources of light," she explained as she magicked her phone into her hand and pressed some buttons, "this happens." She pressed the go button, the phone said a rapid-fire stream of syllables, and an intricate pattern of violet light and darkness illuminated the ceiling. "The waveforms interfere with each other. You can do something like this from one source and get the same thing, it'll interfere with itself."

" **What?** " Sheila asked, confused and disturbed.

"That's how it works, no joke," Michelle replied. "That's not just magic, that's how light actually works when you do that."

Sheila's head flumphed down on the generous stock of pillows. Sirale was not among them; one of the other kids was cuddling him that night. "It's too much right now, I have so much economics to learn," she replied.

Among everything that she had to learn about, that dismal science was the most critical. The basics of uplifting an economy directly from feudalism to fusion (with no fossil fuels in between) were familiar to the specialists, as this was not humanity's first rodeo in that general arena; the Japanese government in particular had a lot of key pointers to offer, as a gate to a Type 3 (similar to a Type 1, only with more gods) had opened in Tokyo's Ginza district while Frisk was still a teenager. An invading army of swordsmen and (biological) orcs had learned the very hard way that the locals had magical powers, overwhelmingly superior military technology, a rapid-deployment portal network, and an enthusiastic murdergod on speed dial. (The conversation between that murdergod and the priestess of the other side's murdergod was surprisingly amicable.) It didn't take long before nearly all of Earth's dimensional portals originated from Earth.

King Asgore, who had done much of the organizational work of establishing her initial government himself, had warned Sheila in his deep voice that she couldn't meaningfully make decisions about anything until she understood it, and even with doubled time and the world's best teachers, it would take her several months to grasp the full extent of the word 'infrastructure' in a mid-21st-century economy, and they had to start building one before that; architects and city planners were frantically submitting their bids already.

Chara had well and truly beaten the Cantopians into submission, so the cops that the Dreemurrs had brought out of retirement had only a handful of immediate problems to deal with; the provisional code of laws was very basic and immigration was more or less outlawed due to the risk of exploitation. (Some NGOs had offered to provide humanitarian aid; Asgore had politely declined.) The Dreemurrs had established healing centers, where Chara's former singers focused on patients while the Song of Healing was constantly broadcast through speakers. This service was available for the low, low price of $12,000 and the US government paid for it half the time, and people were being portaled in at the rate of one a minute and rising. (Literal conveyor belts were to be installed shortly.) The agreement gave the Cantopian government an immediate income source and the Dreemurr family an even larger fortune with generous salaries for everyone involved. There was an argument- often made on the news- for the shock being worse on Earth than Cantopia, as the medical establishment was largely shattered and quite a few doctors and nurses announced their upcoming retirement. Asriel had openly discussed this as a problem, even as he helped open the centers himself; just because humanity had gained access to this power did not mean that humans ought to rely on it.

There were bright sides, of course. Sheila had picked up the local customs of Mt. Ebbot and many of the general national customs of the United States within hours, and she socialized well with the other kids in Toriel's school. (She still had to be tutored separately, as her skills and knowledge were all over the place from a 21st-century perspective.) Her accent was musical, but her rasp was completely gone; she talked a lot like Michelle, and she had an extreme knack for social situations in a way that Michelle frankly envied. On the other hand, she'd needed Michelle to explain to her that the people running her government were, and would need to be, loyal to the Dreemurr family and not some other group or ethos. There were people chomping at the bit to exploit Cantopia and everyone in it in a million different ways.

"I wish the Song of Faith worked here, when I go home, I'm going to have it sang on me all the time," Sheila lamented, glancing at the portal. Asriel didn't want her to go anywhere where songs worked until he was sure that the magic gene had well and truly taken root.

"The Song of **what**?" It was Michelle's turn to be confused and disturbed.

"The Song of Faith, it makes you more confident. We sang it regularly." Chara used it as a disloyalty detector; rebels under its influence were far easier to identify. "I know, you don't have a spell for that."

 _Dog, they have_ _ **mind-altering**_ _spells there and she's talking about using one on_ _ **herself**_ _?!_ "I wouldn't **want** a spell for that!" Michelle almost shouted but avoided waking up her siblings. "That's... a guarantee to make bad decisions!"

Sheila looked utterly lost and even a little upset. "Are you saying that a queen shouldn't be confident?!"

Michelle stared at her alternate. "I'm saying that you should only be confident if you know what you're doing is right! Look- I know-" Michelle put her thoughts in order, figuring out what Sheila believed and what the disconnect was. "I know that your only actual experience of this is a guy who thought that everything he was doing was right, just because he was the king, but that is **not** how it works. If you want to be an actually good ruler, you should never be completely confident. You might have to pretend to be, but you should never actually be too sure of yourself. The only way to actually be right is to find ways that you might be wrong. And even then, sometimes, you just have to choose anyway." Winning the war had been brutal, but winning the peace was the really tough part.

"I'm happy we have the time thing," Sheila replied.

"You're not going to know within a day if a decision was right or not, not for the big stuff," Michelle said, sighing.

"So I can't be sure if I'm doing the right thing, and even if I am wrong, I'm still the queen. On Cantopia, I'm inviolate. So I'm responsible for everything, and even if I'm blamed, it doesn't matter." Michelle wondered how great Sheila's social intelligence really was, for her to begin grasping an entirely unfamiliar ethical system so quickly.

"Crowns are heavy," Michelle replied, and Sheila got the metaphor. "Also, it kind of does matter, because if you really screw up, the people there will be demanding democracy or something." One subsistence agrarian being a figurehead (so far) of a hard-uplifted society was bad enough; one and a quarter million of them actually trying to make uninformed decisions would be vastly worse.

"Gary explained that to me, and it still just seems so weird."

"Oh, you don't need me to tell you about this, you've got your boyfriend to tell you," Michelle teased.

"He is **not** my boyfriend." She said it in a particularly mischievous, 'exact words' way, but it didn't imply that they weren't dating; rather, it was a movement in the other direction, but what was above 'boyfriend'?

Michelle stared at her counterpart in complete shock. "You're **kidding**. You have to be kidding. You just met him! Are you serious?! **King Gary?!** " There were a lot of other things she could have said, about the sheer idea of marrying so young, but none of them applied to the ruling queen of an alien planet.

"'The politics, the logistics, and the love all pass muster,'" Sheila said, and Michelle knew who she was quoting immediately.

"Oh Dog. Dad really said that. He's **eleven** , Sheila."

"Well, we're not getting married **yet** ," Sheila said. "Your grandma said 'we have plenty of time to be sure', so we're going to have the wedding on my fourteenth birthday." The Cantopian 'year', a full cycle of the solar spot's movement, was exactly 360 days long. The difference between the Cantopian and Earth days was a handful of milliseconds, and time on Earth passed a teensy bit slower due to motion and gravity wells. "And you, dear sister, will only be thirteen," she said with a deliberately haughty affect.

Michelle sat up. "I have experienced at least three and a half more years of life than you have, and you **know** it." The Dreemurr kids became rememberers at age nine.

"And in all that time, no one has ever done this," Sheila said, also sitting up with her hands innocently in front of her, and Michelle saw the incoming pillow in her peripheral vision and shot up a hand to block it before it knocked her in the head.

"Against **me**? You must have a death wish!" Michelle theatrically clenched her fist and six pillows rose like zombies. She snapped her fingers and they all flew at their target at once. Sheila would surely one day develop the same multiple-objects control as Michelle had, but, before then, she could do little against the converging attack other than block and duck.

Knowing how she was outclassed, Sheila simply grabbed one of the pillows with her mind, flinging it, intending to do them one at a time. Michelle ducked down, simply taking it in the head, and Sheila didn't have any idea what Michelle was doing until the blankets and sheets rose up under her, as Michelle telekinetically yanked Sheila's feet downwards, swiftly flipping her around and wrapping her up.

"You're marrying my brother? Fine, you can sleep in his bed, Your Majesty. I'll take you right to him, just like this."

"Okay. With **your** blankets."

"Oh, fine, I guess you're r-" This time, Michelle did not see the telekinetic pillow coming at all, and it caught her in the back of the neck. "How are **you** my alternate?!"

Sheila laughed, but it seemed forced, and untangled herself from the blankets. "I think the gravity is getting to me, maybe it's the vaccinations or the magic, maybe just the food, but I've been feeling really weird, and... down there, I've been..." She trailed off and looked away.

"Wait, are you having your period too?" Sheila looked at her blankly. "You know, menstruation, the thing that happens to girls our age?" The blank look continued. "Oh Dog, nobody ever **told** you?!" Michelle visibly shuddered, her arms vibrating with shock. The idea that nobody had ever told Sheila about this stuff was sharply disturbing. Both Asriel and Arial had explained to Michelle in exacting detail last year what she could expect, what it would do to her, and what she could do about it; she'd telekinetically eased the whole thing out that morning in the bathroom and worried no more about it. (There were many things she did not envy the girls who lived in the 'before-time' for, and not being able to do that was decisively one of them.) "Okay, we have to get to the bathroom, I'm glad we already told you how **that** plumbing works..."

* * *

If someone had, five years ago, asked Michelle what she'd be doing in four years, she might have answered with a lot of things that would seem weird and fantastic to a pre-Return Westerner. Absolutely none of them would have involved the truly lavish, splendidly royal wedding of her alternate-dimension counterpart and her younger brother. For one thing, she couldn't imagine that he'd pick up the responsibilities of an actual king - a king with a real job, to help his queen move Cantopia from an agrarian idyll straight to a 21st-century, fusion-powered, portal-networked paradise. That was the thing with Gary, Michelle recognized - he saw people in need, and he had to help them, regardless of context or personal cost. This had put him at the right place and the right time to become engaged with Queen Sheila Dreemurr, and it'd also put him in the right mindset to shepherd almost one and a half million people (Michelle's estimate had been off) towards a better civilization.

The economics had been surprisingly easy, even as the teens' royal authority grew from figureheads to actual rulers. There were no fossil fuels on Cantopia, no elements heavier than bismuth on the whole planet. There were a surprisingly large number of rare earths- the creator entity hadn't known nor cared about their rarity on Earth- and the lack of anything resembling latitude (the anentropic solar spot moved, the planet did not spin) made it much easier to portal around. The mining and farming had gone from an initial state-owned system, which had made Cantopia the equivalent of a giant, benevolent company town, to a mostly market-based system. (The Internet was screaming the whole time, of course. Michelle had told her counterpart in very elaborate and detailed terms why not to listen to the Internet.) There were more roads devoted to auto racing than to actual transportation, the sky reserved for private planes, winged monsters, and one particularly flappy Darkner. Cantopians had taken a surprising liking to golf once some Earthlings had shown it to them, and the courses were considerably larger to match the lower gravity. There was not a single 'lower-class' Cantopian in existence, a planet of all lords and no peasants, with wealth often being measured in productive acres and robotic equipment (the maintenance guys were some of the richest people in that world), and the assorted vices of Earth did not, as a rule, take root there; Gary and Sheila worked constantly to prevent any sort of decadence or addiction from taking hold, and Gary had eventually employed as Praetor the one person he knew was absolutely committed to justice, no matter what: his older brother, James, who had finally fully taken the mantle of the role last month.

There were weird problems, though, the monsters among them. Cantopians had never lived with monsters, and all of them could sing; that had made some of them actually dangerous to people in a way that Earth monsters were not, and a lot of them were actually aggressive in a way seldom found on Earth. (Trauma, Frisk had explained. The monsters were manifestations of the Cantopians' lifelong trauma from being under the thumb of a supernatural lunatic, and it would take decades before they would be able to get over it.) Whatever the creator entity had done to Cantopians made them genetically incompatible with Earthlings without serious bioengineering; fortunately, that was a thing they had access to, and that was why Sheila was meeting her in their personal playground, along with her plushie, grandmother, and brother, of course- her brother, the King, the father of Sheila's twin girls, who were expected to be born in eight months or so. _Gary is going to be a dad. Mom's going to be a grandma. Grandma's going to be a great-grandma. I'm going to be an aunt._ It was just so weird to think about.

The babies would, as both Sheila and Gary had absolutely insisted, spend their formative years in a place where both kinds of magic worked, and there was only one of those. With Dreemurr resources, it was not terribly difficult to build a nursery just for them, and Sirale was the perfect caretaker for very young Lightners when their parents couldn't be around. That was what the six of them had come together to discuss, and Michelle could barely even follow some of the conversation, as Toriel patiently discussed what was and wasn't appropriate to have around very young children, and why this piece of furniture needed to be there, and how things could grow with the girls as they grew older. Frisk, in her light and practiced voice, talked about daycare practices and how they affected the growth of children, and Michelle abruptly got the very stark, very obvious idea that Frisk had done the same thing with her. How much of herself was from her altered genetics, how much from her careful upbringing, and how much from her intrinsic nature, her purple SOUL? And the children, who would they be? Their SOULs weren't called back from a child long dead, as hers was (and she tried not to think about that too much).

There was something else on her mind, something she didn't want to tell her family and that she and Sheila rarely discussed. The truth was that **how** they were doing this meant more to her than why. It had turned out that Sirale had a little power, after all, something that he was good at, namely moving the walls of that pocket universe around. Not much, not at once - and certainly not something like bringing the fountains closer together - but just a little at a time, a little alteration to the structure of that particular 34(b). An impossibility, in a way that the creator entity was an impossibility, in a way _that creating any universe at all_ was an impossibility.

She never did get the creator's entity's last words to her out of her mind. "I'll see you again when you become goddesses!" it had cheerfully bid them farewell with. Killing an evil entity, taking over another universe, establishing a paradise, having children - those things were very good to do, and emotional to experience, but they were not the same as having the ability to alter reality - to use science and magic to do what the creator entity did, because if it did it, then so could she. To become, as it were, an actual goddess.

Her challenge ever in front of her, Michelle wondered when she'd see that entity again.


End file.
